
Class. 



Book. , A!^8 Z 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSrr 



The Spirit of Life 

a Book of Essays by 

Mowry Saben 




MITCHELL KENNERLEY 
NEW YORK MCMXIV 



rSz5Z7 

1914* 



COPYRIGHT 1914 BY 
MITCHELL KENNERLEY; 



AUG 22 1914 



©Ci,A380068 



Contents 

OHAPTER PAGB 

I. Nature I 

II. Society and Solitude 48 

III. Heroes and Hero -Worship 79 

IV. Morals 98 
V. Sex 137 

VI. Literature and Democracy 177 

VII. The Superstition of Heredity 202 

VIII. The Loneliness of Life 223 

IX. Conaervatism and Reform ^237 



NATURE 

'TpHERE are many great truths that can be 
expressed only by means of paradox. 
The opposite of nearly every assertion that 
can be made will be true to some point of view, 
and, when a person speaks of Truth, it should 
always be noted from what point of view he 
speaks. Truth has not one side merely, nor 
even two sides, but many, and all of these dif- 
ferent sides must be seen before one can pose 
as an Absolute Philosopher. Idealism and 
Realism are both true, in a sense ; the Idealist 
and the Realist both have something to say for 
themselves. Optimism and pessimism repre- 
sent each a half-truth. There is not a creed 
in the world which Is not partly true. The 
error of the partisan and the sectarian is that 
they insist they have all the Truth, or, in other 
words, a truth which will admit of no modifi- 
cation, which, in the light of experience, is 
absurd. There is always a larger viewpoint 
than the one held. The true philosopher can 

1 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

be neither a partisan nor a sectarian. He sees 
too much to admit of such easy classification. 
Nowhere do we find the principle which I 
have stated exemplified more strikingly than 
in the different attitudes which have been, and 
are still, held toward Nature. One thinker 
maintains that Nature is good; another main- 
tains that Nature is evil. One sees in Nature 
the only good; another thinks that we must 
look elsewhere for all our good. The lover 
of Nature believes that she possesses the eth- 
ical law for our guidance; the sceptic often 
declares that Nature is minus an ethical prin- 
ciple. And so we find a philosopher, like 
Spinoza, unable to discover evil anywhere in 
Nature, while, on the other hand, a philoso- 
pher, like John Stuart Mill, launches a thun- 
derbolt at the Nature-lovers, by declaring that 
every evil found in man may be ascribed to 
Nature as well. Thoreau finds in wood and 
field a certain friendliness, while Darwin finds 
everlasting warfare. Emerson finds Nature 
reflecting the serenity of his own spirit, while 
Carlyle, gazing upward at the stars, is forced 
to cry out, "Ech, it's a sad sight." Margaret 
Fuller said that she accepted the universe, but 
von Hartmann thought that man ought to 

2 



NATURE 

destroy it, so far as it lay in his power. The 
objects of Nature are occasionally greeted with 
contradictory emotions even by the poets. To 
Byron the stars were "unutterably bright," but 
Sir Henry Wotton refers to them as the 

"Meaner beauties o£ the night 
That poorly satisfie our eies." 

Young called them the "eyes" of heaven, but 
Heine saw in them only "golden lies in deep 
blue nothingness." Swinburne and Byron re- 
joiced in the strength of the sea, but Oscar 
Wilde was humorously disappointed in the 
Atlantic. Wordsworth wrote, 

"Two Voices are there; one is of the sea, 
One of the mountains, each a mighty Voice." 

He found joy in 

"all the mighty world 
Of eye and ear, — both what they half create 
And half perceive," 

and he says that he was 

"well-pleased to recognize. 
In Nature and the language of the sense. 
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse. 
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
Of all my moral being." 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

But the anti-Wordsworthians declare that 
Wordsworth found in nature only what he 
discovered in his own mind. 

What must we say to these contradictories? 
Only this, that all of our thinkers and observ- 
ers have been right from their individual points 
of view. They have all seen certain sides of 
the Truth. Nature is both good and evil; 
friendly and hostile; ethical and immoral; 
something and nothing. Nature is the mother 
of physical man, yet the mind of Humanity is 
the author of that nature which is a part of 
our knowledge. 

The reality of Nature for us is just the real- 
ity of our own minds. The World is the con- 
tent of the mind, an apparition of the senses. 
I do not mean to assert that it is nothing more, 
but Nature, as we know her, is not a thing-in- 
itself. Nature is a process of Evolution, a 
struggle, one may say, to bring Truth and 
Beauty to consciousness. Man is the culmina- 
tion of the process, and only in him may any 
ultimate Reality be found. The earth is now 
in man's hands to do with as he wills. It is 
his, and the fulness thereof. If Nature ap- 
pear to him unlovable in some of her aspects, 
it is his business to make her lovable. If the 



NATURE 

animals are ferocious, they may be slain. If 
electricity threatens, it can be tamed. If the 
winds and the waters bear heavily upon us, if 
the earthquake still comes to jar the habita- 
tions and lives of us, it only means that here 
are so many problems of the mind to study; 
so many forces to be overcome, or made in- 
nocuous. And this is just what man has been 
doing throughout the ages. We have been 
learning to subdue Nature and make her obedi- 
ent to our will; and if there still be, as there 
are, recalcitrant forces, the fact only proves 
that we are still at school, studying the mar- 
vellous constitutions of our own minds, of 
which Nature is a part. Nature, as we know 
her, I repeat, is only a reflection of our own 
minds, the partial content thereof, and as man 
comes to know himself with an ever increasing 
thoroughness, he also comes to learn the se- 
crets of Nature, and becomes the master of 
that which, in the limitation of his knowledge, 
seems to lie outside of himself. 

Whether there be any reality in Nature out- 
side of the human mind is a much-mooted 
question among philosophers. Believing as I 
do in Personal Idealism, all Reality for me lies 
in a society of selves, although I am not pre- 

5 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

pared to say that all of them are human. 
They may be, however. A dog and a lily may 
both be, for aught that I know, undeveloped 
men. But I am convinced that, apart from 
minds, whether regarded as human, infra- 
human, or superhuman, there can be nothing 
real from a metaphysical point of view. The 
voices of the mountains and the sea, which 
Wordsworth rightly declares mighty, are only 
the accents of man. The fragrance of the flow- 
ers, and the brightness of the sun, and the glory 
of the moon and stars, are as human as a poem 
by Shelley, or a play by Shakespeare. The 
world of Nature is for us a human world, 
and if it be anything more than this, we shall 
never know what it is, for one can no more get 
out of his consciousness than he can in this 
life get out of his skin. The psychology of 
a lion, as known to the lion, may be a very 
different psychology from the one known to 
the man of science, but it is only the lion which 
man knows that exists for man. The roar of the 
king of beasts may to himself sound musical, 
it may even have certain meanings impossible 
for us to divine, but, if all this be true, it will 
not be profitable for us to consider the matter, 
for we shall never be able to learn the truth. 

6 



NATURE 

The Reality of any animal, if any animal be 
real in a metaphysical sense, does not lie in 
the apparition of our senses, but in some 
deeper self, or soul, of the animal that is for 
us at present unknown and unknowable. 

Nature is not God, as those who regard 
religion with irreverence are apt to fancy; 
Nature Is only a field upon which we wrestle 
with ourselves, until, through experience, the 
secrets of existence are revealed. There is, 
then, on the outside of us, no thorn for the 
flesh, no hostile frown, no diabolical menace. 
A person wholly benignant might always find 
Nature wreathed in smiles. We find in Nature 
only what we bring to her, and if in her de- 
mesne Wordsworth made great discoveries, it 
means only that Wordsworth was a very great 
poet, with a happy faculty for penetrating the 
depths of himself. This is not to assert that 
his primrose by the river's brim, or the daffo- 
dils that he found waving so gleefully on the 
shore of the lake, were altogether the creations 
of his poetic imagination. But the difference 
between the primrose, as seen by Wordsworth, 
and the primrose, as seen by Peter Bell, to 
whom it was a primrose and nothing more, was 
just the difference between the selves of the 

7 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

two men. To Peter Bell, according to our 
Poet, 

"A primrose by the river's brim, 

A yellow primrose was to him, 

And it was nothing more." 

Peter Bell could make nothing of the prim- 
rose beyond the fact that it was a primrose. 
He knew enough to know the flower when he 
saw it. But his difference from Wordsworth 
lay in his inability to derive from the primrose 
the inspiration that came to Wordsworth. 
The trouble with him was that, unlike the poet, 
he had no subjective primrose in his soul, and, 
having none, he was from a poetic point of 
view a dullard. 

A Subjective Idealist holds that one creates 
out of his own mind all that he sees, and hears, 
and feels. And so he does. But one must 
not infer too hastily from this truth that the 
influence, or that mysterious something which 
leads to a poet's vision, comes wholly from 
the mind of the individual himself. The sen- 
sitive plant that Shelley has immortalized ex- 
isted in his mind alone, but it may be that 
something which possessed reality, quite apart 
from Shelley's mind, touched his conscious- 
ness, and helped to create the vision that led 

8 



NATURE 

to SO charming a piece of verse. The rose of 
which the poets sing does not exist outside of 
the minds of the poets, but there is something 
there when the poet looks which enables him to 
see the rose. Even the jagged rocks of the 
mountain-side may possess some reality apart 
from the mind that envisages them, or the 
sense that greets them. It is the mind that 
makes the mountain, and apart from the mind 
there is no mountain; but just what the reality 
of the mountain is, who can say? 

The mistake of the philosophical Realist lies 
in his assumption that realities other than 
mental exist. The conception that such reali- 
ties exist is nonsense, for nothing can exist 
except for a mind, and all material forms, 
upon analysis, dissolve into attributes, which, 
apart from the mind that conceives them, have 
no validity. A thing itself, apart from Its at- 
tributes, is unthinkable. A table, apart from 
the qualities which are purely mental, and are 
what we mean by a table, cannot exist. With- 
out a mind no table is conceivable. Its size, its 
position, its hardness are only a congeries of 
mental attributes. In the case of a living ob- 
ject, such as an animal or a vegetable, there Is 
a slight difference In the problem that calls for 

9 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

solution. But, unless we can conceive of an 
animal, or vegetable, having life in itself, the 
realistic attitude is, even towards them, equally 
untenable. And if these objects do have life 
in themselves, then they possess minds, and 
self-knowledge. I am personally constrained 
to believe that every so-called living thing has 
knowledge, or, at least, a subconscious 
knowledge of itself; and it is at this point 
that Realism might score a partial victory, if 
it were able to emerge from the metaphysical 
fog in which it is now enveloped. The weak- 
ness of many idealistic systems of philosophy 
is that they are, logically, solipsisms. They 
are not able to conceive anything outside of an 
ego which is either human or divine, and, logi- 
cally, every ego to a philosopher like Fichte, 
for whom I have, let me confess, a great re- 
spect, can be none other than an apparition of 
the philosopher himself. Hegel postulates an 
Absolute, but, after all, Hegel was his own Ab- 
solute. Most idealistic systems are not able, 
logically, to get beyond the individual self. 
They are not able to find the other selves; 
they are not able to find Nature. Idealism 
when subjective is logical, but barren. Realism 
is illogical, but it has borne some fruit in 
10 



NATURE 

science. Both theories are only assumptions, 
although in each one finds a necessary assump- 
tion. The truth lies in a synthesis of the two 
points of view, by which I mean a synthesis of 
their visions. All is mind, or self-knowledge — 
that is the truth of Idealism. There is more 
than the individual self, or even than a God- 
self, and its consciousness — that is the truth of 
Realism. The Gordian Knot of Philosophy 
cannot be untied, but It may be cut. I con- 
ceive that Nature, in its Reality, consists of a 
society of selves, each of which possesses self- 
knowledge, and the capacity for being Influ- 
enced by the other selves through the faculty 
of sympathy. I am well aware that there are 
philosophers who will laugh over what will 
seem to them a naive method of philosophiz- 
ing, but if I may be allowed to contribute even 
an atom to the gaiety and humor of sadly over- 
burdened philosophers I shall feel that I have 
not lived In vain. 

Just how the different selves influence one 
another is, of course, another problem. It 
must He in some element of a common nature, 
and, as I have said, the one element which all 
selves may possess, at least potentially, is sym- 
pathy. There must be also some common vi- 

11 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

sion, and in this vision the element of sympathy 
may be seen as the light of lights. We under- 
stand each other to just the extent that we are 
able to sympathize with each other. The per- 
son who has no sympathy for another person 
has no understanding of him. They both live, 
for all practical purposes, in different worlds. 
The understanding that we have of the ani- 
mal world is of sympathy all compact. I have 
often thought that the first man who conceived 
the notion of taming an elephant must have 
been a person largely endowed with the ele- 
ment of sympathy, for otherwise there would 
seemingly have been more elephant than man 
upon the scene where the process of taming 
took place. Our knowledge of plants, too, is 
based upon sympathy. No one could have 
mastered the secrets of grains and flowers 
who had not a love for them. Of none of 
these forms of animal and vegetable life have 
we any absolute knowledge. The grass of the 
field is only grass to us, but what it may be 
to itself we cannot ascertain; but it is sympa- 
thy that brings the poet to the grass-blade, and 
it may be that through sympathy the poet 
really does penetrate a little way into the 
grassy-secret. At any rate, however this may 

12 



NATURE 

be, and it will not be profitable to pursue a 
discussion that must deal with unknowables, it 
is certainly true that the genius of a great 
Nature-poet, like Wordsworth or Shelley, lies 
in the possession of a sympathetic character 
that can be touched to fine issues by the sub- 
tile influences that well up in the world of out- 
of-doors. 

It should now be apparent why a valiant 
sympathy and love for Nature is so essential 
for our welfare. While there is a world 
within us which is not of Nature, an Ideal 
World, from which we learn the nature of 
what we are, and through which we acquire the 
ability to paint the impressions that come to us 
from without with a gorgeousness of color un- 
known to the other self-realities, we shall never 
be very wise unless we learn to appreciate the 
raw material that Nature provides for our 
sustenance. It was all very well for Oscar 
Wilde to assert that he hated Nature, and 
there was something refreshing in his whim- 
sicalities, so paradoxically conveyed, when one 
noted how much pompous flattery of wildness 
there was in his day, and is, even yet, for that 
matter; nevertheless everyone is well aware 
that his professed hatred was, for the most 

13 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

part, but a mere pose. The Art which he 
placed above Nature had to go to Nature for 
its raw material, while to interpret Nature hu- 
manly was a large part of its mission. 
Turner's sunsets may have been something 
quite unknown to the common vision, but 
Turner would never have been able to make 
his canvas glow with those rich sunset scenes 
if there had been in Nature no real setting of 
the sun. And if it be true, as Wilde said, 
that Morris's poorest workman could make a 
better seat than Nature, it was still necessary 
for Morris's workman to go to Nature for the 
material of which the seat was made. Mr. 
Howells, in his plea for realism in fiction, has 
said that the difference between the realists 
and romanticists of fiction is that the former 
prefer a real grasshopper to one made of 
pasteboard, while the latter prefer the imita- 
tion. Whether Mr. Howells is right or not, 
I shall not pause to discover, for it is not sig- 
nificant, so far as my purpose is concerned, 
but it is undoubtedly true that there are a great 
many people who prefer artificial things to 
things that live. These folks prefer a world 
of unreality, which their fancy conjures up, to 
the great world out-of-doors. At heart, such 
14 



NATURE 

persons are pessimists, and out of them, as a 
rule, very little that is wholesome can come. 

I have admitted that one may speak both 
optimistically and pessimistically concerning 
Nature, and speak truthfully. Let me now 
speak optimistically, even if later I am obliged 
to modify somewhat my worded enthusiasm. 
Nature then, I will say, can be trusted. Seen 
through the lenses of man, she is beautiful, 
and, with human assistance, works for good. 
In the large matters Nature is absolutely re- 
liable. Every morning at the appointed hour 
the great sun comes out of the east, and at the 
appointed hour he ushers in the night by retir- 
ing to his chamber in the west. The stars 
move in their mighty orbits, and fulfill their 
destiny. The moon is never disappointing in 
her sweet serenity. The farmer sows his seeds, 
knowing that the seasons will not betray him. 
The sun and the rain will ripen his fruits and 
grains. And if it be said in reply that drouth 
often destroys the work of his hands, that 
freshet and wind and insect are mighty for 
evil, it is sufficient to retort that the human 
mind has not yet learned to enter into full part- 
nership with the earth-mother of its vision. 
Nature is very impartial to her children, but 

15 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

to man belong! the intellect and the strength 
of arm that can bend all things to the measure 
of his will. No matter how severe the indict- 
ment which a pessimist may draw, it remains 
true that Nature's bounty feeds, clothes and 
lodges one and a half billions of human beings 
every year. Without Nature's genial fecund- 
ity, the earth would soon be a tomb of grinning 
skeletons. Tickle the soil with a hoe, and the 
old mother smiles. Nature is the material 
prosperity of man. For ages she kept hidden 
safe and sound those shining particles of gold 
and silver which are now employed in com- 
merce, sometimes to our hurt, as measures of 
value. One might fancy that she hid them 
because she did not desire to see their beauty 
despoiled by commercial greed. When sur- 
veyed broadly. Nature is always beautiful. 
The heavens declare her glory, and the earth 
is more than an art-gallery in its magnificence 
of color. Nature paints the golden year with 
a skill that the greatest artist may justly envy. 
All her works are fair. The green grass 
creeping in the springtime, the sweet-scented 
lilac, the trees with their myriads of leaves, 
the flowers that spot the meadows, and fringe 
the dusty wayside, the limpid pools, the mur- 
16 



NATURE 

muring brooks, the fast-flowing rivers, the gray 
deserts stretching away into the far distance, 
the wrinkled mountains wearing their azure 
haloes, the mobile sea beating with thunder 
upon the shore, the curtain of the clouds, the 
gentle showers of summer, the drifting snows 
of winter, the bursting orchards of the autumn, 
the golden radiance of the day's sunshine, the 
fairy-play of the moon at night, the glittering 
of the stars in the sky-immensities — the fair- 
ness that inheres in our sweetest thought is 
found in all of these things. 

The deep-seeing eye discovers no ugliness 
in Nature's plan. There are comic effects, and 
there is ughness In incompleted things, but the 
end is always like a perfect statue. The ich- 
thyosaurus, the plesiosaurus and the ptero- 
dactyl, "the dragons of the prime that tore 
each other in their slime," are passed away; 
higher and fairer forms have succeeded them, 
and to-day whatsoever is grim and forbidding 
among the fauna of the earth Humanity is 
learning to destroy, that the sight may not be 
offended by monstrosities. The monsters were 
only experiments, the way-stations, perhaps, of 
selves mounting to higher forms. Each form 
on the road to the human has been a hint, a 

n 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

prophecy, of an all-absorbing purpose on the 
part of life-forces to reach the uplands of 
being. The mineral kingdom would rise to 
the vegetable, the vegetable to the animal, and 
the animal to Man. In the realm of phenom- 
ena there has been a drama mightier than any 
seen in our theatres, a drama in which many 
good and beautiful things have reached a 
proper climax. 

The poet gets nearer to the heart of things 
than the rest of us, because the poet is a lover. 
We live in a very friendly world, if we our- 
selves are friendly. Hate any living thing, 
and it will either flee from us, or seek to bury 
its claws or fangs In our flesh. But if we learn 
to love any living thing that possesses intelli- 
gence, there seems to be a chord of sympathy 
that can respond to a friendly greeting. The 
herbs of the field will make flesh for artist and 
artisan, and some of them will heal the body 
that is diseased. The mineral and vegetable 
of malevolence will lose their evil qualities, if 
wooed long and earnestly, and reveal the real 
goodness of their natures by soothing the an- 
guished frame, or by driving dull care away. 
What a friend to man is the opium-poppy, and 
tobacco; what a friend. In certain states of 



NATURE 

the system, Is arsenic, or strychnine. The very 
weeds which are trampled under foot, or up- 
rooted, are found by the loving botanist to 
have many charming qualities when their so- 
ciety is cultivated. Perhaps there is nothing 
in the world which will not eventually speak 
to us with a noble tongue, if the ear will but 
listen long and patiently. 

In Nature one may find his strength. The 
strong individual is one who has lived close to 
the heart of things. There Is a solidity In the 
farmer who smacks of the soil which Is like 
the granite of the hills, a solidity that is sel- 
dom found in those to whom green fields and 
running brooks are mysteries. There is a 
whisper of serenity and peace in the venerable 
woods, and in the vales that wind among the 
lonely hills. There is health in the cool breath 
of the mountain, and in the strong breezes of 
the sea. The boy who considers the lilies of 
the field will not sigh for the purple robe of a 
king. There is a subtile music in the rain and 
in the snow which steals upon one at times, 
as if some god of the air were murmuring his 
happiness, as perhaps some god is, or many 
gods. It may be. The red of the morning 
moves us to an attitude of worship, and the 

19 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

gold of the eventide fills us with hallowed 
thoughts. One may feel his own immensity as 
he walks over the broad prairie. The clouds 
that drift across the summer skies often seem 
to me like ships in the atmospheric ocean, sail- 
ing away with a cargo of my sweetest dreams. 
Every object, indeed, is for the poetic sense a 
door opening into the Spiritual World. 

Although man is more, and infinitely more, 
than Nature, the person who forsakes Nature 
for the artificialities of a cheap society will 
be less than a man. As one reads the Eng- 
lish poetry of the eighteenth century, how lit- 
tle does one find to inspire him. It was an 
age of prose and of scepticism, hardly a great 
poetic light shining anywhere. It is small won- 
der that the tender heart of Thomas Gray 
seemed so mournful, that Robert Burns should 
have wasted his energies, and that Oliver 
Goldsmith should have been haunted by mem- 
ories of a Deserted Village. These poets were 
at heart lovers of Nature, and something of 
Nature breathed through them, although there 
was no conception in their day of a Nature 
that lived and breathed. Nothing but mechan- 
ism was seen in the external world, and a poor 
superficial deism was the prevailing religion. 



NATURE 

It was the cry of an outraged soul that was 
heard saying, Back to Nature. Poor, half- 
mad Rousseau saw the light gleaming but 
faintly, but the wonder is that he was able to 
see any light at all. The reader of Pope's 
verse learns how contemptible in many ways 
was English society in his time, a period when 
the "Dunciad" was regarded as a great poem, 
as if it were possible that lines which pilloried 
a few half-starved wretches could be, in their 
essence, a poem at all. 

There is little in that eighteenth century 
which is inspiring, save the revolutionary spirit 
that dared to break out in the American col- 
onies and in France with bold declarations of 
the rights of Man. And yet, when one reads 
the sequel to these declarations, how depress- 
ing does it seem. America has not fulfilled the 
early promise. The red flames of the French 
Revolution lit up the night to how little pur- 
pose ! The king and queen went to the scaf- 
fold, and many a noble likewise, but despotism 
soon came back to the unhappy land. 

The miserable scepticisms and artificialities 
of the eighteenth century were dissipated by 
poets who went back to Nature for their in- 
spiration, poets like Wordsworth and Shelley 
ftl 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

and Byron and Keats. Wordsworth, who had 
been powerfully moved by the French Revolu- 
tion, but revolted by its excesses, was accused 
in later years of being a reactionary, but the 
charge is false. In the best sense of the word, 
Wordsworth was a radical to the end of his 
days, for he was a root-man. But he would 
not worship a courtesan as a divine being, and 
he saw more divinity in the great out-of-doors, 
and in the simple dalesmen of his land, than 
in bloodthirsty mobs. Wordsworth's love of 
Nature was itself a radicalism. And there are 
aspects of Nature which cannot be perceived 
without approaching her in the worshipful 
spirit of this man, who saw that 

"The clouds that gather round the setting sun 
Do take a sober coloring from an eye 
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality." 

and who found, in the union of his soul with 

the beauty of the great world of objects that 

we call Nature, the inspiration to say: 

"Thanks to the human heart by which we live, 

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears. 

To me the meanest flower that blows can give 

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 

There is a strange correspondence between 
the inner life of man and outward Nature in 



NATURE 

her varying moo^s- There Is the same sweet- 
ness and crabbedness; the same gentleness and 
rage; the same generosity and niggardliness; 
the same light and darkness. In both Nature 
and man there Is music; in both there is dis- 
sonance. Nature and man develop pari passu. 
When man becomes intelligible, Nature be- 
comes intelligible. One sees purpose in Na- 
ture when one sees purpose In mart. It Is the 
intelligence of man, Indeed, that lights up the 
external world, and makes the shadows to flee. 
The harshness of Nature dies with the growth 
of gentleness in man, and there are times when 
conviction obtains in me that a perfect man 
would be reflected In a perfect Nature. Is 
Nature, then, but a mask that hides the real 
face of man? Perhaps that would be an un- 
wise thing to say. Nevertheless, a good man 
has power to destroy the evils of Nature that 
burden the understanding, a power that the 
bad type of men do not possess. Moral 
growth purifies the human intellect, and makes 
it a conqueror. The moral consciousness may 
prove, In Its ultimate development, Indeed, to 
be a power that will enable the intellect to 
penetrate Into nooks and corners of Nature, 
now apparently Impenetrable, and to discover 

£3 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

thereby how to control earthquakes and vol- 
canic eruptions. Does this sound mystical? 
Very likely it does, but we live in just this 
mystical kind of a universe. The ethical per- 
son will conquer the earth, because he is the 
only person who really sees the earth. All who 
have genuine power of vision, all who discover 
and invent and create, are, in the last analy- 
sis, and in the deepest sense, moral. The sel- 
fish individual never perceives anything but the 
sensual object; the moral individual discovers 
the heart of the object, and its law. I do not 
mean by this statement the persons who are 
conventionally moral, for such persons are 
often the most evil of our species; but I do 
mean the great knowledge-lovers of the race. 
The great soul is one that loves its work, its 
tools, and the earth upon which it toils. He is 
a poet who perceives that he is a creator, and 
every great discoverer and inventor has been a 
poet, no matter how unconscious he may have 
been, and doubtless was, of his poetic quality. 

One learns his own nature by looking out- 
ward. This is a paradox, and its truth is often 
denied to-day. It is said that one must look 
within for his inspiration and his law; and, in 
the deepest sense, that statement is true. But 
24 



NATURE 

what Is the modus operandi by which a person 
succeeds In looking within? One would sup- 
pose from much of the cheap talk of the hour 
that all which is necessary to make one an in- 
fallible authority, a master of life and morals, 
Is the retirement of oneself into oneself, and 
after becoming a hermit, an anchorite, to listen 
Intently to some voice that will speak within 
the soul. Now the voice of Truth does speak 
within the soul, but it does not speak to one 
who enters a hermitage, unless one has had a 
rich experience. A hermit may hear a voice, 
but it is far more likely to be the voice of in- 
sanity than of reason. Those who speak of 
going Into the silence merely Inform the world 
that they have periods when they are afflicted 
with a touch of lunacy. We never really look 
within until we look without. A healthy ob- 
jectivity makes the subjective life sweet, and It 
Is the only thing that does or can. No one 
really sees himself, until he sees himself in 
his fellows, and in the mirror of the world. 
Man Is a social being. His social-consciousness 
Is the source of all his wisdom. He must re- 
flect upon all that he sees and hears and 
touches, but, if he sees and hears and 
touches nothing, then he has nothing upon 
25 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

which to reflect. The quidnuncs of the present 
time who speak of getting beyond sex and self 
and personality, and I know not what else, 
do not raise their intellectual stature by the 
fractional part of an inch. They simply mis- 
take absolute ignorance for absolute knowl- 
edge ; nothingness for real being. When Jesus 
wished to impress a truth upon his disciples, 
or the persons who listened to him, he did not 
advise them to go into a silence, where nothing 
objective might be seen or heard; no, he told 
them to consider the lilies of the field, the 
grass, the ravens, the sparrows, the sky, or he 
told them the story of the Prodigal Son or the 
Good Samaritan. Walt Whitman, in one of 
the most beautiful of his poems, has shown 
the nature of a healthy objectivity, by describ- 
ing a child who went forth one day, and found 
himself identified with all that he saw. 

"There was a child went forth one day; 

And the first object he' looked upon, that object he 

became ; 
And that object became part of him for the day, or 

a certain part of the day, or for many years, or 

stretching cycles of years. 
The early lilacs became part of this child. 
And grass and white and red morning glories, and 
26 



NATURE 

white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe 
bird. 

And the third-month lambs, and the sow's pink faint 
litter, and the mare's foal and the cow's calf. 

And the noisy brood of the barnyard, or by the mire 
of the pond side. 

And the fish suspending themselves so curiously be- 
low there — and the beautiful and curious liquid. 

And the water plants with their graceful flat heads 
all became part of him." 

There is nothing within the mind more sub- 
jective than the objects of Nature, when one 
has gone forth, like Whitman's child, to view 
them, and they have become part of him. But 
one must view them. Landscapes and the 
poetic forms of Nature close at hand will not 
reveal themselves, or their secrets, in the trance 
of pure silence. They must be seen. That 
was a wise observation of Cowper, when he 
noted 

"How much the dunce who's sent abroad to roam 
Excels the dunce who has been kept at home." 

The person who communes with visible and 
audible Nature does not need to enter a clois- 
ter. Wisdom is not born by closing the eyes, 
but by keeping them open. We never learn to 
be kind by shutting ourselves up, and thinking 

n 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

about kindness. We learn to be kind by going 
out into the world where we may suffer, and 
thus learn how to sympathise with the suffer- 
ings of others. We do not become wise by 
shutting ourselves up, and thinking about wis- 
dom. We become wise through experience. 
The Hindu fakir is not a wise man; he is a 
fool. The law of our being is not learned, 
and our moral guide is not discovered, by the 
incarceration of the body in a self-inflicted 
prison. A soldier on the battlefield will learn 
more of sound ethic within an hour than a 
closet-philosopher will learn in a lifetime. The 
moral law is discovered only through consid- 
eration of our relation to all realities. A 
farmer sows his wheat that the world may 
have a supply of bread. But let us suppose 
that a body of closet-philosophers should ap- 
pear in the field and trample down the grain, 
quite in ignorance of the harm they were do- 
ing. Their action would be, in the truest sense, 
immoral, for the people dependent upon that 
wheat-field for their bread would go hungry. 
A closet-philosopher hugging his silence would 
never have learned that wheat was good for 
food, nor would he have so much as learned 
that a man was good for anything. The 



NATURE 

Hindu swamis who emigrate from their homes, 
and captivate silly women, have not learned 
the worth of Humanity In general, or of the 
individual in particular; for one must indeed 
mingle with his fellows, and rub shoulders 
with them, in order to learn that they are too 
valuable to be absorbed into the nothingness 
of the Hindu Absolute. 

The meaning of man, like the meaning of a 
wheat-field, will be found only through experi- 
ence. Years of meditation in lonely privacy 
will not teach one as much concerning a person 
as an hour of earnest conversation with him 
will, or a day spent in close observation. 
There must be perception before reflection. 
Knowledge comes to us largely through the 
senses. It is true that the understanding lies 
back of the senses, and that, without the under- 
standing, the senses would be meaningless ; but 
it is no less true that without the senses the 
understanding would be futile. It would be 
like a well without water, or a field without 
soil. There are five of these senses, and all of 
them need to be cultivated to the utmost. Yet 
a man may not employ one of them vigorously, 
but some bigot will cry out, "Beware! there is 
danger ahead!" A widespread fear exists that 
«9 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

one may see or hear or touch or taste or smell 
too much. This fear is born of morbid intro- 
spection, and may be cured only by giving the 
heart for a time to Nature. Nature seems to 
say to us : "Behold, I have given you a world 
to be enjoyed. Do not be afraid of it. If you 
will love it, you shall have great love in re- 
turn." And the real difference between the 
person who is wise and the person who is ig- 
norant is more largely than is generally sup- 
posed a difference between the man who has 
used his senses and the man who has not. The 
word sensual has come to have an evil mean- 
ing; nevertheless, it is the sensual man, rather 
than the one who has not used his senses, who 
has learned and lived the most. The so-called 
spiritual man is usually very thin. The evil of 
sensuality, so far as sensuality is evil, springs 
from excessive gratification of one or two 
senses at the expense of the rest. Nature pun- 
ishes excess, because excess is really starvation. 
Lack of fulness is the penalty which one ex- 
periences for his partiality. It is only through 
acceptance and enjoyment of the whole of 
things that one grows into a condition of 
virtue. 

It is said sometimes that certain things are 
SO 



NATURE 

unnatural, but I must confess that the notion 
of there being some things which are unnat- 
ural means nothing to me. Whatsoever a 
person Is able to do Is natural. Whether it 
be desirable or not Is another matter. The 
unnatural Is simply that which cannot be found 
or Imagined In Nature; It Is, In other words, 
the unthinkable. It Is not unnatural to kill, 
or to do other things which may justly be 
branded as crimes, but It Is undesirable that 
persons should live who have a mania for 
crime. No matter what may be thought of per- 
sons like Oscar Wilde and Paul Verlalne, let 
us at least avoid the error of declaiming against 
them on the ground that they were unnatural 
characters. The nightingale and the screech- 
owl are both members of the great family of 
Nature, and so are Beethoven and the person 
who does not know one note of music from 
another. It must be admitted that one who is 
lacking In some genuine good, whether that 
good be regarded as aesthetic or as moral, is 
lacking thus much In ideality, but It is possible 
for us to overlook the value of uniqueness 
In personality, and to regard uniqueness, 
merely because It Is uniqueness, as criminal, 
which it is not. Genius and philanthropy are 

31 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

uniques, but, unless these qualities be placed in 
the category of insanity, they must be accepted 
as genuine goods of life; and in the future, 
when there may not be the same desire for 
sameness, especially the sameness of medioc- 
rity, that exists to-day, the widest differences 
in personalities may be highly prized. 

A love for Nature which does not include 
Man is pernicious, or may be. One feels that 
Thoreau was somewhat lacking in humanity, 
and that John Burroughs has blended the hu- 
man and the wilder elements much better. 
Still, the love of Thoreau for Nature, and his 
scorn for most of the human beings he found 
around him, were due to a certain passionate 
desire for sincerity. The flora and fauna of 
the earth have not learned the trick of unblush- 
ing mendacity which has been acquired by 
their human superiors. John Muir, living in 
the wilderness, can place implicit dependence 
upon the creatures and vegetable life which 
he greets. He knows the nature of the beast, 
and the vegetable. Speaking personally, I am 
not very fond of wildness, for I prefer the 
warm touch of the human, with all its evil, to 
a life far removed from the habitations of 
those who are of our blood; yet I must con- 



NATURE 

fess that experience has taught me that a lover 
of Humanity is made, if one can but get the 
best that Nature has to give into him. A cul- 
tured man who lives much out-of-doors, under 
the broad open sky, in communion with the 
woods and fields, and viewing the far-off hills 
skirting the horizon, will find the breadth of 
the sky, the strength of the hills and all the 
genial influences of the woods and fields silent- 
ly stealing into his way of thinking. To retire 
from time to time into solitude makes one 
broader and nobler than before the retirement 
from society. Nature has not been loved 
enough in the past, and the result has been a 
certain meanness in all of our attitudes. The 
blood in our veins and arteries has been but a 
thin and sluggish current, our heart-throbs 
have been feeble, and our pulses have not finely 
thrilled, because we have not been moved by 
the melody that wells from the heart of every 
object, if sympathetically viewed. If we will 
but listen, we may hear choral songs issuing 
from the creeping grass, and the wind-tossed 
flowers; mighty symphonies blown by the 
trumpets of the sky, and the antiphonal of the 
sea. The birds are vocal with the happiness 
of Nature, and the hum of the insects is the 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

distilled essence of all natural joy. We have 
but to listen to the vocalization of Nature to 
go forth into the world with a new gladness 
in our hearts, that shall later well-up within 
us as a grander music than any that has been 
blown by the pipes of Pan. But there is more 
of Truth and Goodness proclaimed in the 
hoarse bass of the frog's orchestra in the marsh 
than can ever come from the soul of a person 
who has hugged his squeamishness, like a cloak, 
around him so long that he has come to regard 
Nature as a thing indecent. Well shall it be 
for us, if we listen long and earnestly to the 
whispering of the wind among the trees, and 
find therein, as in all the voices of the day and 
night which issue from the world, that seems 
to be external to ourselves, the inspiration of 
a larger song. 
To find 

"tongues in trees^ books in the running brooks, 
Sermons in stones, and good in everything" 

is a part of our life's mission. 

It is largely through contact with Nature 

that one becomes acquainted with oneself. I 

think that we may trust the man who gloves 

Nature. There is a deep happiness in him. 

34 



NATURE 

If he enjoys the bracing chill of a Winter's 
day, one may find in his life some of the same 
bracing quality. The person who loves the 
purity of the snow is himself pure. The man 
who thrills at the sight of the golden dandelion 
by the dusty wayside, who looks for the first 
modest violet, and is moved by tender thoughts 
when he hears the leaves rustling in the autumn 
wind, is a gentleman. The man who loves the 
songs of the birds has a song in his own heart. 
There may be a world more beautiful than 
this planet upon which we live, somewhere 
within the deeps of the eternities, a sweeter 
and a grander one. I am satisfied with the 
beauty, the sweetness and grandeur of the 
earth. I know how much of pain and sorrow 
we are called upon to endure, I am well aware 
that one would not wish to live alway in the 
old home, after so many of the beloved of our 
youth and age, our parents, our friends, and 
the romantic companions of the days are gone. 
Yet if there be for us a life after death, a 
realm beyond the grave, where we may find 
those whom we have loved and lost awhile, I 
am certain that I should desire to find it very 
much like the world that I have known. I 
am not sure that heaven would be heaven to 
35 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

me if I could not hear still the wind whisper- 
ing in the pines, the bee buzzing in the clover, 
and the cricket chirping in the drowsy days; 
if there were not nightingales and mocking 
birds, and the more modest robins, to sing for 
me, and somewhere a sandy beach where I 
might hear the voice of the ocean, with its 
marvellous thunder, and its no less marvellous 
whisper. 

I love the silences of Nature — the stars that 
make no sound as they travel in their mighty 
orbits above us, the daisies and the buttercups 
that smile upon us as we pass, the forests that 
stand immovable in the pomp of high-noon, the 
clouds sailing across the blue, the azure-hued 
peaks of the long distances, the full tide of the 
great river that glides almost without a ripple 
on its breast, the splendor of the sunset-seas, 
the magnificent rising of the dawn. These too 
live in the soul as an emotion, a kind of un- 
written music, which genius has power to mould 
into ordered melodies and harmonies. 

How can one be a disciple of Haeckel, or 
fail to be a poet, who looks upon a field of 
golden maize, or upon a field of grain as the 
wind rides over it in billows? The grapes 
purpling in the mellow air of autumn, the long 
36 



NATURE 

trailing vine of the pumpkin that has pushed 
through a fence to hold up its yellow blossom, 
are as fine as anything which the material 
sphere can show to reveal the secrets of the 
forces at work behind evolution. 

Everything that is exists for him who is great 
enough to envisage it. The life that now is 
reveals man as the crowning glory of Nature, 
the goal of evolution. What lies ahead of us 
belongs to the unknown. In the end the earth 
does but shelter our bones, not our thoughts 
and aspirations. As one of our own poets has 
told us: 

"... the hiUs 
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun, the vales 
Stretching in pensive quietness between; 
The venerable woods; rivers that move 
In majesty, and the complaining brooks 
That make the meadows green; and, poured round 

all. 
Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste, — 
Are but the solemn decorations all 
Of the great tomb of man." 

But must we pause here? Death is indeed 
the final word of Nature. She that brings to 
life the thrilling and exuberant vigor of the 
senses lays us low when the measure of our 
days is passed. But Nature herself is called 
87 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

in question by philosophy. To the poets who 
have loved her most, there has come a whisper 
that Nature is largely an illusion. Who loved 
her more than Walt Whitman? And yet it 
is the voice of Walt Whitman that says 

"May be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, 
men, hills, shining and jflowing waters, 

The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms. 

Maybe these are (as doubtless they are) only ap- 
paritions, 

And the real something has yet to be known." 

These lines of Whitman that seem at first 
blush so pessimistic, because of their agnosti- 
cism, are really based upon the sweetest hope 
and noblest dreaming of philosophy. I said 
that I might be obliged to modify later my 
worded enthusiasm for Nature, and so I will 
say now, in opposition, apparently, to what I 
have been saying, that there is many an ugly 
aspect to the Nature that is known to the 
senses alone. The beauty of Nature, when not 
imaginatively interpreted, is more than half 
illusion. If there be growth, there is also 
decay; if there be health, disease is always 
stalking somewhere in the background. The 
flesh refuses to remain sound and sweet. Mad- 
ness walks abroad. Nature is a society of Ish- 

38 



NATURE 

maelites, and her robes are bespattered with the 
blood of innumerable victims. Not an object 
but has its enemy. Tears follow close upon all 
laughter; sorrow dogs joy at every step. Burns 
speaks of "Nature's social union," but he found 
it only in the tenderness of his own heart. Are 
the microbes that kill the most beautiful vege- 
table and animal forms, and man as well, bound 
in an amicable union to anything outside of 
themselves? The mosquito is our enemy in 
a deeper sense than we knew a few years ago, 
and no longer may we wax sentimental, with 
Sterne's Uncle Toby, over the house-fly. 
There is not room in the world for us both. 
When we have learned that a tiny insect, long 
supposed to be harmless, has power to murder, 
no matter how unwittingly it may be done, an 
Aristotle or a Shakespeare one may be led to 
query whether Nature be not an enemy rather 
than a friend to mankind. 

If physical Nature were indeed a thing-in- 
itself, there would be no ground for our high 
human hopes and aspirations. It is only 
through the perception that Nature is but an 
apparition, half revealing and half concealing 
the spiritual reality of the soul, that we are 
able to enjoy her in any hearty and intelligent 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

fashion. To love Nature truly one must rise 
above her. No child ever loved another child 
as the father, the mother and the poet have 
loved children. When Jean Paul Richter said 
Ich liehe Gott und kleine Kinder, he voiced 
the same feeling that the philosopher must 
have toward Nature. The child is lovable, not 
merely because it is a child, but chiefly because 
within its weakness and innocence, and out of 
them, the glory and strength of manhood or 
womanhood are growing like the dawn of a 
perfect Summer's day. "I love God and little 
children!" Yes, O German poet and sage, so 
does all that is divine within all of us. We 
love the Perfect for itself, and the Imperfect, 
because the Perfect has incarnated itself within 
it, and may nowhere else be found; but in its 
strength and majesty the Perfection that dwells 
only within Imperfection does raise the weakest 
thing from the dust toward those immeasura- 
ble Heavens of Being, which are the fountain- 
light of all our day. Regarded as a process. 
Nature has power to teach, soothe and sustain; 
regarded as a hard and fast reality, she mocks, 
irritates and maims the human spirit. Words- 
worth did not find his light in Nature; he 
illumined Nature with a light which he had 
40 



NATURE 

found elsewhere, a light that never was on sea 
or land. 

How happy seems the mad sensualist, lover 
of forms, who dwells in temples made with 
hands, and worships the temple rather than the 
Reality for which it stands ! But his career is 
usually cut short, and in the evening of his 
life. Nature is found to have left her curse, 
rather than her blessing, upon him. One must 
live in a transfigured world to enjoy for long 
even the world of the senses. For the philos- 
opher, too, there are always perplexing prob- 
lems, which often tend to rob him of half his 
natural happiness, and seem to leave him in 
the end no better off than the mad sensualist 
himself. For the philosopher sees how lack- 
ing in rationality the old earth is in many of 
her aspects, how pitiless, indeed, is Nature. 
He will admire, but he will also shudder, at 
the vision of the 

"Tiger, tiger, burning bright 
In the forests of the night," 

unless he finds the actuality dissolved in the 
roseate glow of its higher Reality. Civilized 
man has emerged from the savage. Shall not 
the tiger, too, emerge from his bloody desires, 

41 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

and develop an ethical consciousness; is not 
his animal nature a milestone in the infinite 
evolution of a real self? The philosopher 
must ask the question. I have sometimes 
thought that Darwinism may not be radical 
enough, that in truth all the lower forms of 
life, animal and vegetable alike, may be real 
selves which shall yet reach phenomenal ex- 
pression in the stature of man. Perhaps the 
sympathy felt by many a tender, poetic soul 
for the forms on the nether rungs of the ladder 
of existence comes from a subtile intuition of 
experiences through which all of us have 
passed. 

If we look too closely at the physical world, 
or study its history too diligently, we shall, un- 
less possessed of an ineluctable faith, find much 
which will disturb the serenity of our minds. 
Is aught immortal? The earth is strewn with 
wrecks; the geological record is crowded with 
tales of disaster. The ichtyosaurus, the 
plesiosaurus, the pterodactyl, the mastodon, 
how real these must have seemed in their day 
of glory, how terrible to their enemies upon 
whom they preyed, and whom they dislodged 
in the struggle for existence! Yet to-day they 
are gone ; the places that knew them know them 
4S 



NATURE 

no more; a thousand types are gone. So far 
as we can see, death was really death to these 
monsters of an older time. And yet one can 
but feel that they, too, were struggle rs after 
a higher life than any which they achieved. 
They were greater than their ancestors, and, 
monsters though they were, may they not have 
essayed higher flights than it was possible for 
them to accomplish? And shall we be forced 
to confess of those ancestors of man, who 
helped to bring him along, step by step, on the 
upward-path of evolution, that they perished 
miserably, with no hope of resurrection? Did 
Tennyson dream a vain dream, when he dared 
to trust 

"That not a worm is cloven in vain. 
That not a moth with vain desire 
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire. 
Or but subserves another's gain.''" 

We do not know. We must confess ourselves 
agnostics. But does not our sense of justice 
demand for the animal something of that 
which we ourselves desire? It may be said 
that animal immortality is not required for the 
conservation of values, and this may be so; 
but the thought will not down in my mind that 
every form of animal, and even of vegetable, 
43 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

life may represent, in Reality, some ideal as- 
piration which is deserving of the reward of 
infinitude. Perhaps in an ideally-real sense, 
Burns was right when he spoke of a social 
union in Nature, that included the field-mouse, 
and, let us add, the mountain-daisy, for his 
love for these inspired two of his most beauti- 
ful poems. I am indeed convinced that if there 
be any real values in the infra-human lives, 
they will be conserved, and, as I remarked 
above, I cannot help believing that there are. 
These enmities on the physical plane, form con- 
tending with form, and even with man, may 
serve some purpose in the divine economy, 
of which the individual, In his present state of 
development, has no knowledge, and of which 
he can form little or no conception. 

I will pause no longer among these possi- 
bilities. In considering the case of man, we 
stand on firmer ground. There is little even 
here which we can prove by the aid of logic, 
but Humanity is an affirmation, not a negation. 
Every individual is an affirmation. Nature may 
be an apparition and nothing more, but man 
is not an apparition. Man is a creator, a first 
cause. The world is his organized intelligence, 
and his dreams point to worlds unrealized, but 
44 



NATURE 

yet to be realized. There could be no vision 
without one to see, and unless there were per- 
manent realities there could be no transient 
appearances. If Nature be but an apparition, 
it is an apparition of man. Nature is a partial 
photograph of the human soul. It is not the 
full apparition of the soul, but it is what we 
see in our present state of development. The 
universe is incarnated in the mind; innumera- 
ble universes may there be incarnated, each 
awaiting the hour when it shall unroll like the 
panorama of this earthly scene. The life- 
blood of Nature flows in our veins and 
arteries; her fairness is our fairness; her ugli- 
ness, too, if there be ugliness. What is there 
to fear? Even our doubts are self-raised; they 
do not rise in anything external to ourselves. 
And what is a doubt but an inverted dream of 
hope and trust, the fair world of the mind 
turned topsy-turvey in the humor of a grim, 
yet playful, scepticism? All that is noblest in 
us despises a coward, and the negations of 
Materialism are the intellectual cowardice of 
Humanity, which we must learn to despise more 
than the tremblings of the physical coward. 
The brave man affirms. He believes in him- 
self — in his ideas, in his dreams. He looks 
45 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

up and not down, forward and not back. Hav- 
ing seen the light that never was on sea or 
land, he never doubts its reality, but is guided 
by its rays in all his experience. He has in- 
finite faith in himself, infinite faith in Humanity. 
With this faith burning brightly in his heart, 
he travels on the endless road of existence, 
confident that there is no spectre which shall 
not be laid, no dragon which shall not be slain, 
no wall which shall not be levelled, no moun- 
tain which shall not be climbed, no sea which 
shall not be crossed. Noble harmonies well 
up in his soul. Poetry finds him, and all things 
are in his keeping. And, in spite of hostile 
appearances, and the discoveries of science, he 
finds in his philosophy a transfigured world, 
whose atoms are the forms of the world that 
we have always known. He who knows this 
transfigured world will find in George Herbert 
a prophet, and accept his vision of these ma- 
terial forms. 

"Nothing hath got so far, 

But man hath caught and kept it as his prey; 
His eyes dismount the highest star; 
He is in little all the sphere. 
Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they 
Find their acquaintance there. 
46 



NATURE 

For us the winds do blow^ 

The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains 

flow; 
Nothing we see but means our good, 
As our delight or as our treasure; 
The whole is either our cupboard of food. 
Or cabinet of pleasure. 

The stars have us to bed; 

Night draws the curtain, which the sun withdraws. 

Music and light attend our head; 

All things unto our flesh are kind. 

In their descent and being: to our mind 

In their ascent and cause. 

More servants wait on man 

Than he'll take notice of. In every path 

He treads down that which doth befriend him. 

When sickness makes him pale and wan. 

O mighty love ! Man is one world, and hath 

Another to attend him." 



n 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

1^ /TAN acts in Society; he thinks and dreams 
in SoHtude. It is not well for a man to 
be alone too much; the gregarious instinct is a 
very healthy one, yet the health of the indi- 
vidual demands that he shall retire from time 
to time into the solitudes, where he may hold 
communion with his own self, 

"Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife." 

There can be an excessive activity of the 
social instinct, healthy as in the main that is, 
and in most men there is an excessive activity. 
To be alone with their thoughts and feelings 
is painful to them, and so they hasten to find 
their place in the crowd again. Indeed the 
citizen does not love the solitary man over- 
much. He notes the "lean and hungry look" 
of the solitaries, and finds them infected with 
revolutionary thoughts and anti-social notions. 
To go away from the city to the country, or 
to the seashore or mountains, is well enough in 
48 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

the sultry days of summer, but to retire into 
one's self, and to live there, does not impress 
the average citizen favorably. The solitary, 
it may frankly be admitted, is a rather danger- 
ous person, who is likely at any time to come 
out of his retreat for no other purpose than 
to unsettle human values. 

It is natural that the conservative should 
frown upon him, for Society in the mass is 
always organized stupidity. At bottom it is 
a mobocracy. Ideas find the gregarious soil 
shallow and barren for their seeds. But the con- 
servative is always at home in the crowd; he 
is no alien to Society, but to the "manor born." 
And there is much to justify the conservative. 
Society is the home of the graces and refine- 
ments, of love and friendship. Whatsoever 
is most human in us — our interests and inti- 
macies and enjoyments — everything, indeed, 
that apparently makes life worth living seems 
to pass from us when we leave the habitation 
and the street. Moreover, Society is the goal 
of ambition, of achievement, of all things which 
human beings are able to accomplish. We 
should not be surprised then if Society should 
prove to be a jealous mistress, for she is quite 
right in holding that all the issues of life and 
49 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

death are fought for her, and that without the 
assembling of men together, there is nothing 
ultimately true or good or beautiful; that the 
individual by himself is meaningless. The 
Greeks called the private man an idiot, and 
reveakd their usual discernment by so doing, 
for the man who holds aloof from his kind 
for no better reason than his dislike for them 
Is a worthless specimen of his genus. 

Nevertheless, Solitude has claims that may 
not be put aside. Whatsoever is good in So- 
ciety, whatsoever is true and beautiful, has 
come out of Solitude. All great thoughts, all 
noble ideals, have been born in Solitude. The 
tall spirits of the race have not been the most 
gregarious ; they have not been what the man 
in the street calls "good mixers." They have 
not in reality been unfriendly; on the contrary, 
they have usually been more friendly than the 
persons whose faces always glowed with 
smiles, when they passed their neighbors on 
the thoroughfares, or met them in the drawing- 
room. But their friendliness has taken another 
form, a form which later has been seen for 
what it was, and their thoughts are now spoken 
by every tongue, and their stride marks the 
time of every footstep. 
50 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

Society is the high-water mark of realized 
fact; Solitude is the ideal which would realize 
a larger vision. Masses of men are always 
satisfied with themselves ; the children of lonely 
thought are never satisfied, for they are only 
too well aware that there are heights of life 
which they have not ascended, depths which 
they have not explored. They perceive the 
possibility of an experience beyond experience, 
a beauty sweeter, a truth higher, a goodness 
nobler than any of current report. They dis- 
cover that, no matter how artistic Society's 
tailor may be, the coat that he makes is soon 
threadbare. The genius is always somewhat 
cavalier In his dealings with the popular idols, 
and It may be that he not infrequently loses 
sight of the metal in present fact, because of 
the tarnish there, yet he is never quite oblivious 
of the metal. But his optimism towards the 
future carries him away from the cities and 
farms of the present to the mountains of the 
prophetic spirit, from whose summits he may 
survey the gleamings of a Golden Age and the 
City of God. 

The genius of Solitude is the true eye of 
Society. Ordinarily, men are blinded by the 
dust and heat of partisan and sectarian strife, 
61 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

and even more by commercial interests. The 
pressing care of the moment — the hewing of 
wood and the drawing of water — seems to be 
the only thing worth while to the majority. 
Society has decreed the law, and the masses 
have no other will than to obey. No higher 
will is known. Society has its conventional law, 
its conventional morality, its conventional re- 
ligion, and its conventional way of doing busi- 
ness. These things are taken for granted. 
They are not reasoned upon by the average 
person. Most people are sticklers for prece- 
dent, and believe that to obey is the highest 
virtue. History is regarded by them as a truer 
teacher than the prophet. 

Society is always outwardly respectable and 
decorous. Within the mansions, life is gay. 
Men are well-tailored; women are richly 
gowned. The spoken words are softly uttered. 
The parson prays for the welfare of his flock, 
and drones out platitudes in his sermon. The 
merchant and the manufacturer are content as 
long as profits are secure. The wealthy man 
is honored, and usually worshipped. Surely it 
would appear that all things in Society are 
well-ordered; are at one, indeed, with the 
divine will, 

52 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

But our lonely poets and prophets and phil- 
osophers are not satisfied. They profess to 
see evils in Society that are commonly over- 
looked; to see, in fact, what it is not fashionable 
to see, nor respectable. They see the gay 
mansions, but they see the hovels too; the rich 
garments, but the rags of the poor no less; 
the soft words they hear, but they also hear the 
curse. These men are not satisfied with the 
success of the manufacturer and the merchant^ 
while a world of misery lies all around them, 
the world of the poor who go scantily clad, and 
often hungry and without a sheltering roof. 
They are certain that Success must be a very 
unlovable god, he is so partial, and the prayer 
and sermon that do not proclaim a real brother- 
hood of man, and a universal fatherhood of the 
divine, jar upon their ears. The poet finds 
himself stifled in this atmosphere of commer- 
cialism which has never absorbed the fragrance 
of the flowery meads, and knows nothing of 
majestic rivers and sky-piercing mountains. 
The great deeps of Solitude have nourished 
lovelier ideals than the conventional ones of 
prosperous financial and industrial magnates, 
and between these ideals of Society and Soli- 
tude there is a very wide gulf. The artists 

6S 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

and the philosophers despise the men of busi- 
ness, and the men of business in turn despise 
the philosophers and the artists. 

It is very unfortunate, this feud between the 
realists of Society and the idealists of Solitude, 
but there can be no question which party will 
be obliged to yield in the end. All the charm 
that our Society of to-day possesses it owes to 
the idealists of the past. There is no citizen 
of the present who would reverence the society 
of his remote ancestors. Let him despise the 
poet and the prophet as much as he will, he 
has yet entered with joy into the inheritance 
that was won for him by a poet's song, and 
a prophet's iron tone. The mansion, the genial 
conversation, the graces and amenities of life, 
the church are all debts which he owes to a 
spirit whose latter-day incarnations he affects 
to scorn and treat with utmost disdain. There 
is scarcely a comfort which he enjoys that 
would have been attained but for the masterful 
purpose of art. 

Emerson has said that "Solitude is imprac- 
ticable and Society fatal." Without the ideals 
which the lonely spirits of Solitude bring to 
our doors. Society would indeed be fatal. The 
hope of Society lies in the men of reflection 

54 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

and vision, into whom the Life of Ages is 
"richly poured," the "Life which we find 

"Breathing in the thinker's creed. 
Pulsing in the hero's blood, 
Nerving simplest thought and deed. 
Freshening time with truth and good. 

Consecrating art and song. 
Holy book and pilgrim track. 
Hurling floods of tyrant wrong 
From the sacred limits back." 

It is this Life of Ages to which all righteous 
appeal is made. If we can square with that, 
the foundation of our purpose is a rock; if 
we cannot, it is nothing but flimsy and treacher- 
ous sand. Society is indeed a precious thing, 
and its reality must be preserved, even if its 
forms must be destroyed again and again. 
There is a society not yet recognized by that 
which calls itself Society, an association of the 
poor and lowly of the earth, who are regarded 
as fortunate if they secure the crumbs which 
fall from rich men's tables; an association of 
individuals organized only by the bond of the 
spirit, who, for the most part, know nothing 
of the graces and amenities of life; the unkempt 
and unlettered children of the field and work- 
55 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

shop, whose joys are few and cares many. 
These, too, must emigrate from the hovel to 
the mansion; they must cease their dreary stam- 
mering, and learn to speak with articulate 
voice; they must find room in the church to 
worship ; they must receive their equitable share 
in the profits of Society, which now fall mainly 
to the manufacturer, the merchant and the 
financier. 

Society is a will-o'-the-wisp until it is founded 
on human brotherhood; until every man knows 
that he is a brother to every other man. The 
joy of life must become a universal joy, not 
one to which only a few are invited, while the 
many remain alien and outcast. No man should 
be an alien and outcast. Not until Humanity 
becomes the cornerstone of Society shall an in- 
dividual stand firmly planted on his feet, and 
with eyes that may gaze unflinchingly into the 
future. We may bind the limbs of men to-day 
with iron, we may gag their organs of speech, 
we may crush the very life whose blood flows 
within vein and artery, but these bound limbs 
shall yet smite, these tongues shall yet speak, 
these lives shall yet be free. If Society denies 
justice, the red banner of revolution shall be 
unfurled in the air. He is a very ignorant man 
56 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

who fancies that coercion settles anything. The 
life that is the peasant in time learns to smile 
at the life that is the king. It learns to smile 
and crush Its oppressor. Things are never set- 
tled until they are settled right. Let the con- 
servative pile up his obstacles on the pathway 
that leads to progress; let him pile them up 
until they have become mountain-high; let him 
scream in anger until he grows purple with 
apoplexy; the rising tide of human aspiration 
is of a river that shall roll aside every obstacle, 
and every man who denies the law of justice 
and generosity. 

For there is an Infinite in every man which 
speaks from the deeps of his Solitude, and is 
sooner or later heard by all. This Infinite in 
man's larger self. We may convince another 
by argument that our wrong is right, but one 
cannot convince oneself, and in this truth the 
weakness of Society's conservatism is found. 
In the din and bustle of Society, the familiar 
tones are heard to the exclusion of the sky- 
born melodies that are heard in Solitude, and 
which are later interpreted as the accents of di- 
vine love, but, although In the noisome clamor 
only the jarring notes of greed and private 
warfare are heard, there are hours when even 

67 



THE SPmiT OF LIFE 

Society may be said to go into Solitude, hours 
when the divinely human energies within us 
work miracles. The Infinite has spoken, and 
Society has listened and heard. Society then 
leaps out of its evil into its good. In those 
golden moments there 

"gleams upon our sight. 
Thro' present wrong the Eternal Right." 

Solitude is not, like Society, a good in itself. 
We retire into ourselves only that we may 
emerge again, and appear in Society with a 
quickening thought. Apart from Society, there 
is in Solitude no meaning. Although we see 
clearest and think our greatest thoughts in 
Solitude, our thoughts would be meaningless, 
and our vision vain, if we did not direct the 
energies of our nature, inspired by thought 
and vision, to the upbuilding of a noble Society. 
Nay, were it not for Society, there could be 
no human seeing and thinking. A person takes 
bis city with him when he retires into his own 
privacy. The use of Solitude is not that men 
may get away from men, but that men may 
learn how to get to men. Solitude is valuable 
because it enables the individual to work out 
the problems of Society; because it teaches him 
58 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

how he may become a worthy citizen. He is a 
false teacher who proclaims that Solitude is 
a good in itself. A man is not by nature a 
monk; a woman is not by nature a nun. One 
does not need to spend his days and nights in 
a lonely cell, nor in the sandy desert, nor 
among the lonely hills. Cloistered virtue is not 
the sweetest. For very few men or women 
is the life of a recluse good, and rarely is it 
beautiful. He who retires from Society be- 
cause he hates Man is worse than the meanest 
individual who, content with his lot, abides in 
Society. Life is sweet; life is good; life Is 
beautiful. Only in and through Humanity may 
one live truly. To divorce oneself from So- 
ciety is to make oneself incomplete. There is 
no good without brotherhood. The vision of 
a virtuous Solitude is the apotheosis of an 
ideal Society. It is an outlook upon Society 
without blur or stain; upon a fraternity living 
and working together for the common good. 
And to receive the full benefit of Solitude, to 
secure the vision, it Is not necessary to leave 
the crowded street. One has only to live in 
noble, masterful thought. Only in such Soli- 
tude may a self hear the low, sweet prelude to 
the Society of the future. 

59 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

It is often said that all great souls have been 
born lonely, and loneliness, it must be admitted, 
has been a characteristic of all the tall spirits 
of the race. It is a sad truth. Many have 
been well-nigh friendless; some completely so. 
Some whose lonely burden seemed to them at 
times greater than they could bear have cried 
in anguish of heart for the companionship that 
was denied to them. And the pity of it all is 
that the persons who have been denied com- 
panionship, because of their finer sensibilities 
and nobler ways of thinking, were just the per- 
sons who would have been the truest friends. 
Think of Jesus in Gethsemane sweating great 
drops of blood in his agony, lonely, alone with 
his dream of the Kingdom of Heaven, and in 
his consciousness perceiving the spike-piercing 
cross just ahead of him! Think of Gautama, 
a prince by birth, leaving his palace, to become 
a beggar, that he might discover the law which 
should cure the sorrow of the world! Think 
of Spinoza, with the curse of his own people 
upon him, because he dared to be loyal to 
the truth as he saw It! Think of the men of 
genius In all ages, whose dreams of truth, of 
goodness, of beauty, caused doors to darken 
at their approach, and, In some instances, led 
60 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

them beyond all sheltering roofs, to find peace 
only in the grave ! 

Nevertheless, these individuals have not been 
quite friendless, even in their darkest hours; 
they have not been quite alone. In their 
dreams they saw fair men and fair women; 
fairer, indeed, than any that the earth knew; 
fairer, I fear, than any that the earth will 
see for a long time. But the poet sees in every 
man and woman something fairer than what is 
seen by the common eye. Even the best are 
better when a poet sees them. There is a 
London, a Paris, a New York, that have no 
existence outside of the idealist's dream, which 
yet Is more real than the actuality, because it 
will be the acknowledged reality of the future, 
long after the present has faded, to use Pro- 
fessor Tyndall's famous simile, "like a streak 
of morning cloud into the infinite azure of the 
past." "In the world," said de Senancour, "a 
man lives In his own age, in Solitude in all the 
ages." Some compensation the men cut off 
from their fellows have had, although it is 
far from being a full, or adequate, compensa- 
tion. These men have been destitute of that 
which sweetens the cup of life, and makes the 
bitterest drops less bitter. And It is quite 

61 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

possible that a prophet, if rejected too long, 
will grow sour and waste his energies in a 
fruitless Solitude. Emerson, who is often so 
wise, has said truly that "It is easy in the 
world to live after the world's opinion; it is 
easy in Solitude to live after our own, but the 
great man is he who in the midst of the crowd 
keeps with perfect sweetness the independence 
of Solitude." Yes, after all is said, one must 
find his Society in these creatures of flesh and 
blood. Even if the men and women of the 
dream-world be fairer, yet it is a dream-world 
still, and, until it is realized, it can never be 
the soul-satisfying thing that a genuine friend- 
ship is. 

Great is the man who, knowing the value of 
friendship, dares to be himself in every crisis, 
at whatever hazard. The masses will not think 
beyond the pressure of the hour's problem, but 
the genius is he who perceives the problems of 
the generations to come. There is no perma- 
nence in the realm of thought. The thoughts 
that appear to-day to be the most secure, the 
thoughts of religion, of morality, of govern- 
ment and education, shall eventually pass away 
like mist before the sun, or submit to modifica- 
tions that will be almost equally destructive. 
62 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

There Is nothing permanent, nothing stable, 
save the human soul, out of which comes all 
thought. Society Is not composed of unchang- 
ing atoms. The Individuals who compose 
Society are as changeable and fleeting as the 
winds. All things pass away. God after god, 
dynasty after dynasty, have risen and fallen, 
to give place to other gods and dynasties, 
whose reign shall be but for a day. But chance 
Is not the secret of change. The world is a 
growth. Society is a growth. First comes the 
lower, then the higher, and next the higher 
still. More and more does Society become the 
incarnation of a noble purpose. I am not one 
of those who believe that progress is inevita- 
ble, in the sense of being produced by a blind 
evolutionary force; I am certain that a very 
large amount of devolution has now and again 
taken place, but the history of man to date 
has, upon the whole, been upward, and so It 
will, I believe, continue to be. As the world 
has grown, so will It continue to grow. 

The Society of the past has been based very 
largely upon force. Not altogether, for no 
society could have endured for a month with- 
out a modicum of freedom, but for the most 
part it has been based on the Insecure founda- 

63 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

tion of coercion. The religion, the morality, 
the governments of men have been maintained 
by the military and the police. Through gener- 
ation after generation the cry has gone forth 
to men from the dictators of Society: "You 
must think what we tell you to think ; you must 
feel as we tell you to feel; you must do what 
we tell you to do; and you must abstain from 
all that we forbid." More than once the 
deepest wisdom in the world has been crushed 
under the burden of these commands, enforced 
by ignorant and brutal hirehngs. Neverthe- 
less, out of the heart of Solitude have come 
great thoughts and mighty aspirations which 
Society was unable to kill, because within that 
Solitude the divinity of man was brooding, and 
keeping watch that no true value should ever- 
lastingly perish. 

Slowly, but surely, a new spirit is coming into 
our world, a spirit that teaches us that physical 
force is no real force, after all; that the 
Niagara-torrent of the heart, the Nile-stream 
of the mind, cannot by any human agency be 
prevented from reaching their native ocean. 
More and more Society learns, as the meaning 
of love dawns upon the race, that government 
by physical force is fallacious ; that love is the 

64 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

only cohesive force that will bind nations and 
individuals together. The thought of love, too, 
is modifying all our old notions of religion and 
morality. In the past both religion and 
morahty dealt largely with the terrors of the 
law; a species of terrorism inimical to all sound 
morals and religion was inculcated. Gradually, 
however, the conservative mind is learning to 
perceive, what lonely prophets have known for 
generations, that religion and morality are the 
natural gestures of man's mind; that they are 
not commandments or prohibitions; and that 
no supernatural god, or earthly governor, is 
responsible for them, or required to enforce 
their mandates; that they are, indeed, the 
natural flowering of our highest faculties. In 
the light of reason, the uselessness of attempt- 
ing to bolster up that which is natural to man 
becomes clear. It was only the false elements 
in religion and morality that needed the coercive 
power of government to maintain them, and 
not until these false elements pass away shall 
the values of religion and morality be clearly 
seen. As knowledge grows, however, and love 
overcomes hate, the excrescences of religion 
and morality begin to disappear. To know 
the greatness of man, and to love man because 
65 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

he is divine — this is the only true religion; 
this is the only true morality. In the past 
Society has been mainly concerned with prop- 
erty rights. But love knows no property 
rights. Love says: "Let us sit down together, 
and share our good." Love knows no dis- 
tinction between mine and thine. The only 
property which maketh men rich is a common 
holding in truth, beauty and goodness. There 
are universal spiritual properties more real 
than air or sunlight, and all of them are con- 
vertible into love. We do not see very clearly 
to-day the relations . between these universal 
properties and real estate, or stocks and bonds, 
but it shall yet dawn upon Society, as it has 
dawned upon many a poet and prophet of the 
wilderness, when the secret of life, only to be 
learned through a valiant comradeship, is 
found, that no material possessions are as 
valuable as the possession of warm human 
hearts, and that, in order to possess these, we 
had better throw away our gold and silver, if 
they stand in our way. Society is destined to 
be an association of lovers, whose ardent woo- 
ing of all that is truly large in individuals shall 
put to shame all the amatory wooing of the 
present and the past. I fancy that there will 

66 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

be something amatory in the higher affection, 
although it will come from an amativeness that 
has been transfigured; for when persons truly 
love each other they do not strike the attitude 
of one about to plunge into a cold bath with 
the temperature at zero. Love must express 
itself in some fashion. And Whitman's poems, 
in the division of Leaves of Grass called 
Calamus, contain words which express literally, 
and not figuratively, the coming passion of man 
for man. Indeed to the "good gray poet," as 
we may truly believe, the terms of endearment 
employed were not hollow, but the echoes of 
sweet and blessed moods. 

Love is a revealer, but it is not the only 
revealer, of life. There could even be too 
much love, if individuals were not gifted with 
intelligence. It is sometimes unwise to view 
things at close range. The azure-hued moun- 
tains of the distance are only jagged rocks 
when reached. And when one stands too near 
to Society, the azure-hued ideal of the spirit 
fades into the grayness of the mass. No 
matter to what heights evolution may take us, 
the habit of Solitude will always be required 
for the highest human welfare. The readjust- 
ments of Society can come only through the 

67 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

visions and meditations of the lonely thinkers. 
Society is always the word that man has 
spoken ; Solitude is the word that man is speak- 
ing, or will speak. No matter how strong a 
man's love for his fellows may be, his love, to 
be clear-sighted, requires that he shall go away 
occasionally from its object, that he may com- 
mune alone with the Alone, and thus renew 
his strength. One does not love his friends 
with the right fervor, if they are always within 
the sweep of his daily vision. Most of the fric- 
tion of married life comes from the partners 
seeing too much of each other. Silence is 
needed for our welfare as well as speech; 
Solitude as well as Society. 

An article of the ancient creeds holds that 
dualism is a fact of the individual, cutting him 
in two. One of these divisions is called the 
natural man; the other is called the spiritual 
man. There is also supposed to be an inherent 
antipathy between the two. Not a few power- 
ful minds have believed in this antagonism, and 
Paul made a religion out of it. That such a 
division exists I admit, but there is no reason 
why it should. The natural man and the 
spiritual man should embrace and kiss each 
other, and become one in the flesh and the 

68 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

spirit. The spiritual man, at bottom, is only 
the natural man in full-blown dignity of pur- 
pose, the natural man clothed with the cosmic 
vision. The doctrine that every individual who 
is born into the world must be born again is 
a psychological truth, but this psychological 
truth no more means that the natural man is 
to be put aside than entering a university means 
that the new university man is to put aside the 
knowledge acquired in the preparatory school, 
or the home. The two go naturally together. 
No man is spiritual who is not natural. The 
flesh is not despised by the person who has 
penetrated the mystery of the new birth ; it has 
merely taken on a spiritual meaning; it has 
been transfigured. True, it must not be al- 
lowed to run riot, as perhaps it did in the 
older and more barbarous period; it must now 
take on higher purposes. But every legitimate 
desire of the flesh is no less legitimate under 
the moral government of the spirit than it was 
in the day of anarchy. One must not fail to 
appreciate all that was genuine in the; old-time 
appeal. The natural man sings: 

"I£ she be not fair to me. 
What care I how fair she be." 
69 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

The sentiment sounds selfish, and It may be 
selfish, but there is, even for the spiritual man, 
a certain logic to be found therein. If the 
flowers of the springtime did not bloom for us ; 
if the trees did not murmur in the summer 
breeze, if the breath of the mountains and the 
sea did not bring its delicious coolness for us, 
then we might well say, What does it matter 
whether these things be or no, since they have 
no connection with our organs of sense? If it 
were possible for one to be born without the 
five senses, what would it matter to him if 
the spirits of the rest of us were thrilling with 
delight through contact with the glories of the 
earth? The fairness that is not for us, and 
which can never be for us, is a fairness which, 
so far as we are concerned, might as well never 
have existed. If one has never seen the light, 
the light simply does not exist for him. The 
so-called selfishness of the natural man is often 
nothing more than the commendable desire that 
the fairness of the world may be his, in order 
that he may appraise its fairness at its proper 
value, and not be a thing to fill him with 
melancholy thoughts that turn all existence into 
dust and ashes. The natural man makes a 
legitimate demand. The beautiful world does 

70 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

belong to him; it belongs to all of us. But 
the natural man makes the mistake, until his 
spiritual sight is opened, of attempting to 
enter violently and illegally into his possessions. 
He has never seen himself in his relation to his 
brethren. He has believed that the world be- 
longed to him and to his family. In his selfish- 
ness, he has even called upon the Almighty, in 
the words of a rhyming caricature of the Cal- 
vinist's creed, to 

"Save me and my wife. 
My son Joe, and his wife. 
We four, and no more." 

He has been spiritually blind, and his blind- 
ness has brought him nothing but pain. He 
may not enter into his inheritance until he per- 
ceives that he is but one member of a family 
to which every son and daughter of Adam be- 
longs. When he perceives that all men and 
women and children are growing dear to him; 
when his outlook is no longer bounded by the 
family hearthstone; then, and not till then, is 
he able to make all things his own. By giving 
himself freely and unreservedly to all, all is 
given in turn to him. Then the fairness of the 
world becomes his spiritual possession, the 

71 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

glory of the world enters into his heart; he 
feels the genial influences of all things dwell- 
ing with him : the men, women and the children ; 
the flower-spotted meadows; the swift-flowing 
streams ; the placid lakes ; the green fields ; the 
venerable woods; the silence of the stars; the 
strength of the hills; the whisper of the wind; 
the strong voice of the sea. He is now at home 
in the great sky-spaces; the gods are his 
familiar companions; he communes with the 
mighty soul of nature. 

Not in Society, but in Solitude, does the 
master learn his lessons. Nay, one may not be 
a master, until he has wrestled with himself 
in the lonely field of Solitude, as Jacob wrestled 
with the angel that dark night in the lonely 
valley. Let us be fair to Society, however. 
If in Solitude we learn to solve the lessons 
of life, it is Society that gives the problems to 
be solved, and is the inspiration that compels 
us to solve them. Society is the raw material 
of all problems. Even as God could not be, if 
man were not, neither could man be without 
Society. One may retire from the dust and 
sweat and roar of the city to cool his fevered 
brow in the cool air of the mountains and the 
lakes, but nature has an arctic temperature for 
72 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

the man who becomes a misanthrope. To him 
who has fought a good fight, and failed in the 
seeming, a kind heaven often peoples his soli- 
tude with angels and archangels, but the misan- 
thrope shall find in Solitude only a whip of 
scorpions. No one can flee from himself, and 
when one would flee from human relationships 
the gate of peace is barred for evermore, un- 
less he turns back to go where the voice of 
duty is calling. One may ascend the mountain 
and be transfigured, but the halo is quickly lost, 
if one does not return to the plain where his 
brethren are fighting the battle in which all 
should participate. There is grim satire in 
the lines on the parish priest of Austerlitz, 
written by the Rev. Reginald Heber Howe, 
that every anchorite should take to heart. 

"The parish priest 
Of Austerlitz 

Climbed up in a high church steeple, 
To be nearer God 
So that he might hand 
His word down to his people. 

And in sermon script 
He daily wrote 

What he thought was sent from heaven, 
73 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

And he dropped this down 
On his people's heads. 
Two times one day in seven. 

In his age God said 

'Come down and die,' 

And he cried out from the steeple, 

'Where art thou, Lord?' 

And the Lord replied, 

'Down here among my people.' " 

The lovers of Solitude are those who hope 
to discover in their thinking and dreaming an 
ideal world. Dear, indeed, is the City of God 
to the soul whose heart loves justice and beauty, 
and longs with a mighty passion for the society 
in which all men and women are fair. The 
day is always poor and mean to the man of the 
larger vision. The deeper self grows sick with 
every day's report of sordldness and crime. 
The life around seems empty, a mere collec- 
tion of struggling atoms, owning no law but the 
law of force, and in their labor seeking naught 
but selfish ends. From the turmoil of Society, 
the idealist would wend his way to the vale of 
Solitude, in which no sound of sorrow should 
come to mar his everlasting calm. But there 
is no such Solitude to be discovered. The 
74 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

city's roar is soon heard even on the mountains 
and by the shore of the sea. The ideal world 
must be found in Society or nowhere; in the 
bosom of Society the idealist must find his true 
Solitude, or none shall be found. Destroy the 
world which seems so ugly to the eyes of the 
idealist, and the ideal is also gone, for the ideal 
world is built of the atoms of the real world, 
and one may not survive if the other perishes. 
Our age is preeminent to a degree over all 
other ages in its worship of outward nature. It 
is a worship that was not characteristic of the 
classical world, or of the mediaeval. One may 
justly query whether the modern reverence is 
not overdone. Far be it from my purpose to 
utter a word against the beauty of the natural 
world. True, all is not tranquil and serene 
within it. Earthquake and tornado and vol- 
canic eruption come to jar and jolt. The rattle- 
snake under the rock and the nightshade in 
the glen mar the pleasures of those who would 
find in nature only a sweet rapture of delight- 
ful fancy. But there is, nevertheless, a charm 
in the loneliness of the hills, or the sand rim 
of the sea ; a charm that dwells everlastingly on 
the banks of a babbling brook. Yet let us be- 
ware lest we deceive ourselves. Nature has no 

75 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

meaning apart from man. She wears no sing- 
ing robes, save to the Hstening ear. Were the 
individuals of the world more humane in their 
manifestations than they are, they, rather than 
nature, would be the cynosure of all eyes. 
Even as it is, one finds nature most charming 
when wedded to human interests. The Hudson 
is as beautiful as the Rhine, but on the Hudson 
there are no castles and watch-towers, such as 
have made the Rhine famous in song and story. 
No spot on earth is sacred soil, save those 
places where men have bravely toiled and nobly 
dreamed. 

Solitude we may define as only a vision of 
the Society that is to be. Even now the Society 
of the future is slowly taking its shape, first 
in the minds of the dreamers, and later in the 
structure built of daily acts. Between the 
Society of to-day and the Children of Solitude 
there is an irreconcilable antagonism at many 
points; between ideal Society and rational Soli- 
tude there is none. Every thinker, every 
prophet, every poet, is an architect of the 
future. Aspiration is the cornerstone of the 
ideal city of our dreams. In the best sense of 
a much-abused word, religion is the cord which 
connects the pearls of our thought, for religion 
76 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

in essence is love to God — truth, beauty, good- 
ness — and love to man, who is the incarnation 
of God from generation to generation. 

As the centuries roll on the conviction grows 
in human minds that all things work together 
for good to those who love the ideal. It is 
by no means certain that there is an om- 
nipotence either within or without the visible 
universe ; an omnipotence, that is, which can do 
any conceivable thing, in any conceivable way. 
But the Holy Spirit, whose other name is 
Humanity, is, for every rational purpose, om- 
nipotent whenever the vision is clear. Without 
God, or the Divine Ideal, we are but dust; in 
the ideal we are all-powerful to build the city 
of our dreams. As individuals, we may be 
conscious factors in the work of fulfilling the 
ideal; but whether we are conscious, or are not 
conscious; whether we aim to build, or aim to 
destroy; whether we strive to help, or strive 
to hinder, there is an ideal in the world which 
alone is incapable of permanent defeat, an ideal 
which will be found gleaming wheresoever the 
human light dwelleth. The ideal in man is the 
thinker, the dreamer, the prophet, the poet, the 
artist, the creator of the eternal values of life. 
Its avatars are the individuals who receive these 
77 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

glorious names. Out of the heart of Solitude 
they have proclaimed the dawn ; they have read 
the stars of destiny; they have bathed in the 
all-embracing spirit of the ineffable. As the 
Children of the Light, they have done whatso- 
ever their hands found to do, and through their 
labors Society grows slowly into the living 
reality of their consecrated vision; and so long 
as the light continues to shine, and their strength 
fails not, they will labor to create a Society 
in which truth, beauty and goodness shall reign 
supreme over all and in all. 



78 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 

TF one could penetrate the outward lives of 
-■■ persons who appear commonplace and dis- 
appointing, so as to reach their secret desires, 
one would often have revelations of superb 
beauty not now vouchsafed. Every man would 
possess for us an infinite value, if he could 
always realize his manhood. We are, how- 
ever, often forced to confess, even against our 
will, that the lives of most persons are hideous ; 
that they are not true ; that they are not beau- 
tiful; that they are not good. It is the con- 
stant misrepresentation of human nature on the 
part of those who should truly embody it that 
makes the pessimist scornful of those who be- 
lieve in a Religion of Humanity. 

But most men are better than they appear. 
In the Hero, one finds the genuine stuff of self- 
hood, and in Hero-worship the latent goodness 
and largeness of men peeps out. Man has 
always been a Hero-worshipper; he always will 
be one. Plutarch and Nepos attest the interest 

79 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

of the ancient world in its Heroes. Xenophon's 
Memorabilia of Socrates and the Four Gospels 
reveal how a great man looms large on the 
horizon of time. Boswell's biography of Dr. 
Johnson Is a book that will never cease to 
fascinate readers, because it is an intimate 
revelation of a great character. Carlyle's 
Heroes and Hero-Worship has a tonic quality 
that makes all heroic dreaming seem feasible. 
History at bottom is, as our poet-philosopher 
informed us, only the biography of great men. 
Some modern scientific philosophers, like Her- 
bert Spencer, and Henry Thomas Buckle, have 
sought to wean us from this theory, but without 
success. Carlyle's theory is tenoned and mor- 
tised in the granite of established fact. 

Great history is the record of what great men 
have done; little history is the record of what 
little men have done. In our time most of the 
popular Heroes — the men occupying executive 
chairs, sitting in the senate-chamber, and writ- 
ing books — are small figures whom future ages 
are not likely to take the trouble to become well 
informed upon. Our Heroes are only too often 
pseudo-Heroes, of whom we should be 
ashamed, as some day we shall be. Alas ! that 
so humiliating a confession must be made! 
80 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 

I admit cheerfully that Spencer and Buckle 
are not altogether in the wrong. Every man, 
no matter how great he may be, is to some 
extent the creature of his time. Jesus did not 
monopolize all the goodness of his country. 
There were great teachers just before him, 
from whom he had profited. The Golden Rule 
and the Lord's Prayer were quotations on his 
lips. Even the Pharisees were not all bad; 
doubtless many of them were very worthy citi- 
zens; while the New Testament appears to be 
lamentably ignorant of the Essenes, from whom 
Jesus must have drawn so much of his inspira- 
tion. Even John the Baptist was not quite a 
voice crying in the wilderness. Martin Luther 
was not the whole of Protestantism, and 
Shakespeare was not the only great dramatist 
of the spacious times of Queen Elizabeth. As 
Horace said, there were brave men before 
Agamemnon. Great men are seldom found 
quite alone. Nevertheless, the Hero always 
brings into the world a light and strength of 
purpose that were never here before he came, 
and which were in no way derived from the 
hoi polloi, but were innate. All Heroes may 
be said to belong to the same spiritual family, 
but no two members of this family have quite 

81 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

the same traits. Herbert Spencer, although 
repudiating the Hero, was himself one, and 
proved himself to be the glowing refutation of 
his own argument. What does it matter if 
Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-discoverer 
with Darwin of the law of Natural Selection? 
He did not write the Origin of Species, and he 
has frankly admitted that he could not have 
written it. 

Let men say what they will, the habit of 
Hero-worship is incorrigible. People feel justly 
that the Hero is the one upon whom they must 
lavish their attention. And yet the Hero never 
forgets his kinship to the race. No matter how 
great he may be, he is always a great man, 
and not a superman. Tennyson was true to 
life when he wrote his famous lines in In 
Memoriam on the feeling of one who had be- 
come a celebrity. 

"Dost thou look back on what hath been? 
As some divinely gifted man, 
Whose life in low estate began. 
And on a simple village green; 

Who breaks his birth's invidious bar. 
And grasps the skirts of happy chance. 
And breasts the blows of circumstance. 
And grapples with his evil star; 
82 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 

Who makes by force his merit known. 
And lives to clutch the golden keys, 
To mould a mighty state's decrees. 
And shape the whisper of the throne; 

And moving up from high to higher. 
Becomes on Fortune's crowning slope 
The pillar of a people's hope. 
The centre of a world's desire; 

Yet feels as in a distant dream. 
When all his active powers are still, 
A distant dearness in the hill, 
A secret sweetness in the stream. 

The limit of his narrower fate. 
While yet beside its vocal springs 
He played at coimsellors and kings. 
With one that was his earliest mate; 

Who ploughs with pain his native lea. 
And reaps the labour of his hands. 
Or in the furrow musing stands: 
'Does my old friend remember me?* " 

Browning puts in the mouth of Paracelsus 
the prayer: 

"Make no more giants, God, but elevate the race!" 

But Humanity feels instinctively that the giants 
are its glory. There was no Whig farmer 
ploughing his rough New England hillside who 

8S 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

was not a little more certain that life was 
worth living when he thought of Daniel Web- 
ster. True democracy wages no war on the 
giants; its effort is to level up men to the 
measure of the giants, in order that we may 
have greater ones. The glory of the man who 
ploughs in pain his native lea is not always 
clear, but he reveals, by his worship of the 
Hero, that he has some of the quality of the 
friend who has become the pillar of a people's 
hope, the center of a world's desire. 

The person who believes that life means a 
leveling down has no true conception of what 
democracy is. All the great prophets of democ- 
racy who have come to us with "thoughts that 
breathe and words that burn" have believed 
in the innate goodness and greatness of man. 
They have seen the goodness of Jesus latent 
everywhere. Like the impetuous Father 
Taylor, who, when asked if he believed that 
another man as good as Jesus had ever lived, 
replied, "Yes, millions of 'em," the prophets 
of democracy in general have felt that there 
was something divine in each individual of 
all these teeming millions of the globe. The 
towering genius of a Plato, an Aristotle, or a 
Bacon; the music of a Bach, a Beethoven, or a 
84i 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 

Wagner; the poetry of a Homer, a Vergil, or 
a Milton; the painting of a Leonardo, a Titian, 
or a Raphael — these glories are individual, yet 
they are more than individual, for they are 
born, in some mysterious fashion, out of the 
deeps of Humanity. Perhaps we may venture 
to say that no man is better or greater than 
another in soul; each is different, but shall we 
say that the whole of any man, if we could find 
it gleaming upon our vision, is better than the 
whole of any other man ? We might find per- 
fection in every form, if we could discover the 
essence of every form, an individual perfec- 
tion in each, nowhere else to be duplicated. The 
Hero is most heroic when he proves to us that 
we are quite as heroic as he. We shall never 
sing the same song, or paint the same picture, 
or produce the same strain of music; to each 
Hero the expression of his own individuality, 
but one may not say of any that it is not in him 
to sing a song, or paint a picture, or compose 
music somewhere or other, in time or in eternity, 
as sublimely as the greatest Hero of history 
has done. 

The inner life — the ideal — is that which we 
would externalize. Our noblest life is the life 
of our dream-world. Progress is the rise of 
85 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

Individuals to a consciousness of power, the 
power that enables them to express in tangible 
symbols the realities of their innerness. We 
are learning that to be just human and natural 
is the true greatness of heroism. One does 
not worship blizzards, cyclones and earth- 
quakes; one only fears them. But when the 
spring makes the grass green, and the violet 
blue, and the leaves of myriad trees to flutter 
In the gentle breeze, there is in our hearts an 
almost irresistible impulse to worship. The 
spring is beautiful, because it Is correlated to 
the beauty that is of our minds; nay, it is the 
beauty, in part, of our minds. And so with 
man: his brag and bluster and vain stretching 
move us not, but when harmonious sweetness 
and beauty are developed in a man, the divinity 
of it all finds us. Greatness does not lie in a 
pose, or In a petty talent carefully nurtured, 
but In that genius which Is the flower of simple 
manhood. The polished pebble may despise 
the diamond, but it is the diamond that com- 
mands the markets of the world, while the 
polished pebble has few tc^ do it reverence ; so, 
too, is it with the man of carefully nourished, 
but slender talent, who may despise the genius. 
The ages find that one blast upon the bugle- 

86 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 

horn of genius is worth more than all the pip- 
ing of the little talents. To be a genius means 
that the common attributes of Humanity have 
bourgeoned. 

The Hero is the large man in us all; the 
real man, let us say. We read the tale of 
some brave fellow, and wish that we had been 
on the field of battle with him. We read the 
poem of some Hero of the garret, and find our 
own hearts speaking. We listen to a symphony, 
and deeper selves are revealed to us, as if by 
magic. We never hear of goodness, but we 
are convinced that we are good. And who 
shall say that we are not, if we suffer with the 
Hero in his bloody sweat? Is not goodness 
ours, if we stand ready to perform a noble 
deed, inspired by the heroism of another? It 
is not so much what a man has done, as the 
spirit with which he receives what has been 
done, that counts. The man who feels the 
tenderness of a Buddha is a Buddha ; if a man 
forgives his enemies in the spirit of Jesus, is 
not he, too, a Christ in his day and genera- 
tion? The Hero shines with the light of his 
soul, and lights every other heroic torch; un- 
less, indeed, one has the power to make others 
heroic, he is not a Hero. No man is great 
87 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

unless greatness flows from him into other men. 
The attempt to play the role of a Hero alone 
were as ridiculous as to be an author without 
readers, or an orator to whom nobody would 
listen. 

The Hero Is one who is always true to him- 
self. To his age he may appear a little off- 
color, if his heroism be of the intellect. He 
may not be materially prosperous; probably 
will not be. People will overlook his virtues, 
and discover only his vices. The words of love 
and good fellowship the multitude will not hear, 
but he will, no doubt, be caught with a wine 
glass in his hand, or when he speaks to persons 
not over-respectable in their communities. But 
what does It matter, If he goes to the Cross, 
like the Nazarene, or the stake, like Giordano 
Bruno, or the scaffold, like Sir Thomas More, 
or the gallows, like John Brown? It has often 
been true that heroism of the noblest type led 
but to the grave. But we may believe that 
Lowell saw both aspects of the vision when he 
wrote his well-known lines : 
"Right forever on the scaffold^ wrong forever on the 

throne ; 
But that scaffold sways the future, and behind the 

dim unknown 

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch 

above his own." „^ 
88 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 

Every man is sooner or later regarded as a 
Hero, if he have not failed to do his duty, as 
he saw his duty. Walt Whitman was a Hero 
when he refused to change the lines of his 
poems in order to obtain popularity, although 
he seemed only foolish to most of his contem- 
poraries. No doubt Arnold Winkelried seemed 
a fool to his enemies when he rushed forth, 
empty-handed, upon their javelins, and seized 
them as they pierced his breast. No doubt 
Richard of the Lion Heart and Saladin had 
their detractors in their own day. William 
Lloyd Garrison is honored in Boston now, but 
a Boston mob in broadcloth once had a rope 
around his neck with the firm intention of hang- 
ing him. Regulus, the Hero of the Romans, 
went back to Carthage, knowing that the Car- 
thaginians would put him to death, but how lit- 
tle did those Carthaginians appreciate genuine 
heroism in an enemy! Bruno and Savonarola 
going to the flames for their opinions, and 
Servetus, too, how great they were in their 
heroism, and how little did their contem- 
poraries perceive of their heroic quality! 
Martin Luther going to the Diet of Worms, 
Dr. Johnson writing his manly letter of inde- 
pendence to Lord Chesterfield, Thomas Paine 

89 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

giving up everything for the cause of liberty, 
Byron hurling his defiance at Society, Shelley 
living in accordance with the dictates of his 
own reason, were all Heroes. Socrates drink- 
ing the hemlock when he might have gone free 
was not less, but even more, of a Hero than 
Leonidas with his three hundred Spartans keep- 
ing back the great army of Xerxes at the pass 
of Thermopylae. Goethe was a Hero, because 
he was not afraid to explore the recesses of his 
own spirit. Emerson was a Hero, because he 
dared to turn his back to the Puritanism of 
New England. Dr. Channing was a Hero 
when he split Congregationalism with his ser- 
mon at Baltimore, and Theodore Parker when 
he stood almost alone in the religious society 
of America while proclaiming his transcen- 
dental gospel. We seldom think of Edgar 
Allan Poe as a Hero, but, in his austere devo- 
tion to his art, he was as true a Hero as ever 
lived. 

Every Hero is an epic poem. He is of the 
universal. Emerson has said that "All man- 
kind love a lover," and that should be true. 
But I think that the real heroic-lover will love 
nothing less than Humanity, the world and the 
universe. The love of an individual, which 
90 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 

ends with the individual, means little. A nar- 
row amativeness does not enrich the world. 
Love must be cosmic before it can bud and 
blossom in divinity; it must be unselfish and 
unifying. It is only the small and narrow soul 
that has room in his heart for only one. The 
Hero has room for all Humanity. Within the 
heroic mind and heart there is no place re- 
served for the usurper, who would despotise 
with selfish desire. Every selfish man is a 
bungling surgeon who always mutilates him- 
self. It is the broadening out into the uni- 
versal, the cosmic, that makes of one a 
Hero. 

The person who does not grow diminishes, 
and when the heroic element has deserted one, 
that one is but so much dust. True, no heroic 
person leans very heavily on his reputation, 
for he knows that the desire for a good reputa- 
tion among fools is only a hobby of the in- 
tellectually unemployed, and he is always con- 
tending against the orthodoxies and civiliza- 
tions of the world, because civilizations and 
orthodoxies are always names given to the out- 
grown. The heroic man is a master, and ob- 
tains disciples; any man who refuses to wor- 
ship the idols of others becomes an idol. 

91 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

Very unfortunate is he often in these disciples, 
who lean upon him, instead of standing upon 
their own feet, in an erect posture. The 
measure of a man may always be taken indeed 
by his attitude towards others. It is only the 
small mind that loves to have other minds yield 
to its ipse dixit; the great mind loves endless 
diversity of opinion. The truest follower of 
Jesus is not the one who always asks, "What 
would Jesus have me do now?" but the one 
whose soul, like that of the Nazarene, expands 
beyond his time and place. But it is said that 
a man or woman who follows his or her own 
course, and not some course that has been 
mapped out by others, is ruined. It is a false 
doctrine. Every Hero follows his own course. 
The heroic person will not follow the beaten 
path, if he see a better than the beaten path. 
He will love to walk outside this beaten path, 
lest some strange flower, sweeter than any that 
he has known, escape his vision. He would 
prefer being a citizen of Utopia to being a king 
over any country less fair. His heroism will 
always be impetuously striving for the Golden 
Age, and if he leave the Old City of God, it 
will be only because he is seeking to found a 
New City of God. He will not hate sin, as 
9% 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 

the conformist hates it, for he will seek to find 
even in sin the elements of a larger civilization. 
And yet he will always be kind, he will not ad- 
mire the whip that afforded Nietzsche so much 
satisfaction, for he will never forget that even 
the fools and stupidities are his brethren, for 
whom a glorious future will dawn when they 
shall have learned to leave their foolishness 
and stupidity behind them. 

I have said that man is by nature a Hero- 
worshipper, because he sees that every Hero 
belongs to his own larger self. And is not all 
worship a worship of the larger self? God is 
but our symbol for the Self that is perfectly 
wise and good and beautiful, the Self purified 
from all alloy. There are few to whom the 
worship of Absolute Spirit is pleasing; perhaps, 
in the last analysis, no one has ever reached, or 
ever will reach, such a condition of mind. 
What, indeed, is the significance of the failure 
of Unitarianism to satisfy the human heart and 
mind, if it be not that the God of Unitarianism 
has seemed too far removed from our warmest 
feelings and sweetest desires? In every age 
man has turned to some brother man, and felt 
that in communion with him he was in the 
counsels of God. Zarathustra and Gautama 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

and Confucius were gods to those to whom 
they brought inspiration, even though they 
themselves made no claim to divinity. People 
turned to Jesus, because they needed a human 
God. And when even Jesus seemed far re- 
moved from them, and the belief grew that 
he had become an inhuman judge, holding court 
in Heaven, they turned to the gentle mother 
who had borne him, the mother who had held 
him in her arms, from whom they felt they 
might receive tender motherly consideration. 
And this is why they turned to the holy men 
and women whom the Church placed in her 
calendar of saints. Walter Pater said that the 
smallest curve of a rose leaf was worth more 
than the formless being which Plato prized so 
highly. People do not love beauty or wisdom 
or goodness, save as they see them incarnated 
in some brother or sister who is, or has been, 
in the flesh. Shall we then boldly accept the 
Hero as our God? Shall we accept Jesus as 
our God? or some one who was nobler or 
greater than Jesus, if we can find one? 

No matter what our answer to these ques- 
tions may be, we shall find that in all ages the 
Hero has been the real God of worship. It 
was the common love of Homer that united 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 

Greece, so far as Greece was united. What 
enthusiasm do we find to-day in most lands for 
the great Poet, or Literary Hero, of the peo- 
ple! How the Scotsmen worship Burns, the 
Swedes Tegner, the Norwegians Bjornson, the 
French Moliere, the Germans Goethe, the Por- 
tuguese Camoens, the Spaniards Cervantes, the 
Italians Dante! In all ages there has always 
been some Hero, or there have been many 
Heroes to be the god or the gods of the people. 
Polytheism Is not the Irrational creed that mod- 
erns too often fancy. I am convinced that Hu- 
manity will always find its divinity in Humanity- 
It requires its Divine Man, and will require 
him, until it is learned that Humanity is itself 
divine. Some day the worshippers will all be 
Heroes and gods themselves. But until then 
there will be for Humanity, and must be, some 
men to be worshipped above the rest, even as 
Jesus has been. 

The mastership of Jesus is the mastership 
which all idealists have possessed. Jesus de- 
clared that the Kingdom of Heaven was within 
us, and the years have confirmed his utterance. 
Eating and drinking, and other brute satisfac- 
tion, are not the pleasures that inspire us; the 
inspirations come from the seership of the 

95 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

mind with the Divine Word which we find 
written in forest and field and human litera- 
ture. We reverence the poets, the sages, the 
saints and the men of science who have revealed 
to us our nature and our possibilities. We 
should reverence the prophet, whether he be 
of the first century or the twentieth. We should 
not desire lying flatterers who commend our 
errors. The Hero must be a revealer of 
beauty, nor may he be allowed to forget that 
of beauty rational righteousness is a portion. 
All the great Heroes have spoken eternal words 
to us, and in the doctrine of brotherhood, or 
the love of all for all, Jesus erected a cathedral 
of the spirit that shall endure through all the 
ages. 

There is a truth in pessimism which none of 
us can escape, a truth which has never been 
expressed better than it has been by Shelley, 
who was not a pessimist, but an optimist, in his 
wonderful lyric of the skylark. He says: 

"We look before and after. 
And sigh for what is not. 
Our sincerest laughter 
With some pain is fraught. 

Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest 
thought." 

96 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 

Nevertheless, the sweet songs will continue to 
be sung, and the pain endured, because the 
universe is the incarnation of heroic purpose, 
and out of the universe, the incarnation of 
heroic purpose, all human beings come. 



97, 



MORALS 

"1X7" HEN Herbert Spencer's Data of Ethics 
was first published, and for several 
years afterwards, an intense fear prevailed in 
certain circles, lest Morals were in danger. It 
was thought, in view of the doctrine held by 
the philosopher of evolution, that our moral no- 
tions must be regarded as relative rather than 
absolute, a doctrine which found immediate ac- 
ceptance in many quarters, that a startling lax- 
ness in the ethical atmosphere of the future 
was likely to be found. The character of 
Spencer himself no one thought of impeaching, 
but doubtless not a few recalled the striking 
words of Nathaniel Hawthorne, in The Scarlet 
Letter, where he said: "It is remarkable that 
persons who speculate the most boldly often 
conform with the most perfect quietude to the 
external regulations of society." The fear of 
Spencer's doctrine was due to the feeling that 
the disciples of the new ethics would put into 
practice some of the dreaded iconoclasm of the 
master. 



MORALS 

There is still considerable fear manifested 
on the subject of Morals, by those who believe 
that nothing but police tyranny and the fear of 
gaol, or a future inferno, keeps the majority 
of human beings from doing mischief. One 
often hears that Christianity first made the 
world moral, and is all that keeps it moral; 
and that if the Church and Christianity were 
to pass away many direful calamities would re- 
sult. There is doubtless a grain of truth in 
the latter part of the contention, for the Church 
and Christianity are a part of our seriousness 
of mind, without which evils might indeed 
come. But to the first part of the contention 
it is impossible for a scholar to give his assent. 
For paganism too was quite as serious-minded 
as are our later generations; a little more so, 
I suspect. And one finds, in the moral maxims 
of paganism, ideals quite as high as any which 
are upon the tongues of people to-day. "To 
live is not to live for one's self alone, let us 
help one another," wrote the Greek Menander. 
"Give bread to a stranger in the name of the 
universal brotherhood which binds together all 
men under the common father of nature," 
wrote the Roman Quintilian. And thus 
Juvenal: "What good man will look on any 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

suffering as foreign to himself? This suffering 
is what distinguishes us from brutes." Cicero 
declared that ^'Nature has inclined us to love 
men, and this is the foundation of the law," 
while Seneca wrote, "We are members of one 
great body. Nature planted in us a mutual 
love, and fitted us for social life. We must 
consider that we were born for the good of 
the whole." "Love mankind," said Marcus 
Aurelius, and Epictetus held that "The uni- 
verse is but one great city, full of beloved ones, 
divine and human, by nature endeared to each 
other." Plato taught that it was never right 
to return an injury, and Cleobulus wrote, "We 
should do good to our enemy and make him 
our friend." Hardly less emphatic was Va- 
lerius Maximus, who said, "It is more beauti- 
ful to overcome injury by the power of kind- 
ness, than to oppose to it the obstinacy of 
hatred." The Chinese Philosopher, Lao-tse, 
held that "The wise man avenges his injuries 
with benefits," and Confucius found in reci- 
procity the true rule of practice for every 
human life. One will find the most beautiful 
moral maxims in the writings of Mencius, who 
is regarded by the Chinese as a philosopher, 
second only to Confucius, ^schylus, Sophocles 
100 



MORALS 

and Euripides, Plato and Aristotle have been 
Christian, no less than pagan, teachers. 

There is in Christian morality nothing more 
elevated than the summits of pagan morality. 
To say that "It is peculiar of man to love even 
those who do wrong" sounds like Christian 
teaching, and it is, but it was Marcus Aurelius 
who wrote the sentence. The ideal for the 
philosopher, according to Epictetus, is no less 
Christian in its intent. "A philosopher when 
smitten," he said, "must love those who smite 
him, as if he were the father, the brother, of 
all men." And Plutarch holds that we should 
sympathise with our enemies in their afflictions 
and aid their needs. If it be said that the 
pagans did not live up to these lofty ideals, it 
is sufficient to say in reply that they lived up to 
them quite as well and closely as Christians 
live up to the Sermon on the Mount, and the 
other teachings of Jesus. 

Xenophon tells the story of an old Armenian 
unjustly condemned to death by order of a 
Persian king, who urged that the king be for- 
given, even as Jesus prayed, while on the 
Cross, that his murderers might be forgiven. 
The name of Jesus has come down to us, while 
the name of the old Armenian has not, but 
101 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

both belonged to the same spiritual family. 
All great virtues are of man as man, and not 
a monopoly of any book, or sect, or creed. 
Paganism, no less than Christianity, had its 
saints, and, if the moral law obeyed was sel- 
dom as noble as the moral law professed, the 
delinquency will be found occurring quite as 
often since as before the beginning of the 
Christian era. 

Goethe said that man is properly the only 
object that interests man. This is true, and it 
is this interest of man in man that keeps 
Morals sweet and pure. We are friends and 
lovers of one another, because something is 
found in each and all that interests us. True 
there are Nihilists in Morals, as well as in 
religion, but, so long as man remains inter- 
ested in man, there is no danger that anything 
really precious or vital in Morals will be lost. 
But there are periods when this beautiful in- 
spiration is lost, and, in these unsavory peri- 
ods, the satire of Macaulay finds its point and 
sting, when he speaks of those whose golden 
rule consists of hatred for one's neighbor, and 
love for one's neighbor's wife. Perhaps, how- 
ever, the eloquent essayist and historian put 
the case a little too strongly, for it is not 
102 



MORALS 

hatred, but indifference, that is responsible for 
the state which he describes. The man who 
hates his brother seldom trifles with the affec- 
tions of his brother's wife, but indifference to- 
ward his welfare is indeed responsible for in- 
numerable adulteries. 

Let us not forget, however, that ideals and 
Morals are not necessarily one and the same. 
The word Morals means merely customs, and 
often customs more honored in the breach 
than in the observance. It may be, and often 
has been, regarded as immoral to perform the 
most innocuous of acts. Conventional moral- 
ity always lays stress on the trivial and the 
petty. It is held in some communities to be 
immoral to drink a glass of wine, a frown 
often greets a lighted cigarette, or cigar, or 
pipe, and a statute or ordinance may often be 
quoted in support of the conventional moral 
code in these matters. But the wise individual 
has always done what he pleased in regard to 
these things. Kant, one of the world's great- 
est moral philosophers, enjoyed his pipe and 
glass of wine, and doubtless never dreamed 
that he was setting anybody a bad example by 
doing so. Jesus himself did not disdain the 
wines of his native land, and Socrates could 
103 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

and did drink all the young bloods of Athens 
under the table. To enjoy the earth in hearty 
and honest fashion seems a sin to vinegar- 
faced moralists, but why should one hold a 
vinegar-faced moralist in peculiar reverence? 
To make oneself disagreeable is not quite the 
same thing as to make oneself virtuous, and 
Diogenes with his lantern, searching all Athens 
to find an honest man, might have been com- 
pelled to blush, if some one had taken the 
lantern from his hand, and held it full to his 
face. If Diogenes had been quite as virtuous 
as he professed to be, I fancy that he would 
have abstained from his weary tramps, and 
kept to his tub, rich in the peace of self-con- 
tentment. Why, indeed, should any of us be 
so curious of our fellow's habits, unless we de- 
sire to adopt them as our own? Why concern 
ourselves with what another mortal eats or 
drinks, or how he passes his time, unless we 
desire to share his food and liquids, or to abide 
in his presence? There is too much squeam- 
ishness in our Morals. It is permissible in the 
woods and fields for one to laugh at much of 
what goes by the name of moral lore. The 
boys who swim in the pool do not consult An- 
thony Comstock in regard to the propriety of 
104j 



MORALS 

wearing bathing-suits, but, with a healthy anti- 
nomianism, plunge in nudely, and enjoy the 
water as it splashes musically around them. 
The person who is guiltless of nightshirt or 
pajamas in the privacy of his chamber is not 
necessarily an enemy of civic, or any other 
form, of righteousness. It may shock an 
orthodox Jew to see one eating roast pork, 
but, after all, nobody need be an orthodox 
Jew. Millions of Jews have reformed, and, 
after they have reformed to the extent of en- 
joying a little ham, they become better neigh- 
bors, and more agreeable in every way. Bac- 
chus is reputed, in these latter days, to be a 
very disreputable kind of god, and I dare say 
he is, but candor compels the admission that I 
much prefer his society to the society of his 
most violent enemies. His jolly nature, at 
least, has power to keep me in good humor, 
which is more than I can say for ninety-nine 
per cent, of all the soi-disant apostles of moral- 
ity and reform who cross my path. 

Those who think it wicked for the citizens 
of the world to enjoy themselves are anach- 
ronisms. The Puritan and the Philistine are 
moral humbugs. No doubt they often deceive 
themselves, but there is no form of deception 
105 



-^ THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

which is quite so harmful as self-deception. A 
man may deceive others, and preserve a kind 
of half-sanity. But when a man deceives him- 
self, his sanity is completely gone. Those who 
have regarded Shakespeare and Whitman, and 
a thousand other writers, as immoral have 
been suffering from a mental blindness which 
they fondly mistook for supernatural insight. 
No writer who speaks out of the depths of 
himself is ever immoral in the larger sense. 
He may be immoral to his age, but he will be 
moral to the enlightened of all ages. There 
is nothing indecent in honest nudity, Anthony 
Comstock and his ilk to the contrary notwith- 
standing. Renan said that Jesus had a divine 
incapacity for seeing evil. That to me is the 
most convincing evidence of his divinity. The 
real evil of the world Jesus saw more clearly 
than most people see it, for he saw the evil of 
the hard, cold, unforgiving spirit, of those who 
are selfish, and of those who would have 
stoned to her death the poor, trembling woman 
who had done no more than her accusers had 
often longed to do, and were doubtless guilty 
of doing; but it is true that Jesus did not see 
evil where an Anthony Comstock would see it, 
and every other shallow little Puritan and 
106 



MORALS 

Philistine. There was the same kind of 
healthy antinomianism in Jesus that one finds 
in youth, the same kind of healthy antinomian- 
ism, let me add, that one finds in all persons 
who are worth while. Men have often passed 
in their communities as paragons of morality 
for no other reason than that they were, in 
one way or another, physiologically deficient. 
A sluggish circulation of the blood, an anaemic 
brain, a shrunken organ, have more than once 
given an individual his passport to the heaven 
of the saints. It is the person who suffers 
from a weak stomach that is always most 
shocked by the grossness of the normal appe- 
tite. It is he who is not the full sexual equiva- 
lent of a man who is most certain to deplore 
the sexual depravity of the world. More than 
one system of philosophy, more than one code 
of morals, have been evolved from those 
whose congenital physiologic incapacity suc- 
ceeded in passing among the dunderheads of 
the time as superior moral fibre. Let us learn 
to look facts in the face; let us learn to be 
consistent, and no longer be avaricious of de- 
sire to impose on others, or be imposed upon. 
If there be something wrong with our physi- 
ologies, or with our psychologies, we may right- 
107 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

fully keep the fact to ourselves, although it 
were better to consult a physician; but as we 
value truth, as we honor integrity, as we prize 
honesty, let us not attempt to build up a moral 
philosophy on the foundation of our physio- 
logical, or psychological, deficiencies. Those 
who desire that others should be weak, because 
they are weak, are common enough, in all con- 
science, but they ought to be seen for what 
they are,— the unclean beasts of the great eth- 
ical desert. 

I will admit that it is not quite true to say 
that to the pure all things are pure. There 
are attitudes of mind, there are deeds per- 
formed, that are indecent — that is, unbecom- 
ing. But that which makes an attitude or act 
indecent is the motive that lies behind it. The 
honest writer is never indecent, he is never 
impure, no matter what may be his theme. 
All that may justly be branded as indecent 
in human Hfe, whether of doer or thinker, will 
be found to be based either on thoughtlessness 
or sheer dishonesty — -principally the latter. 
He who lives thoughtfully and honestly is 
never immoral in the true sense. And honesty 
is the first essential. The play which is truly 
salacious, and not falsely so-called, is the dis- 
108 



MORALS 

honest play. All impurity in what passes for 
art is simply an expression of intellectual dis- 
honesty. The great playwright, the great mas- 
ter of fiction, the great artist in every field is 
one who sees life steadily and sees it whole; 
he is one who endeavors manfully to see life 
as it is, or as it ought to be, and in play, novel, 
or other artistic product, reports the vision of 
his entire self. The dishonest writer, or ar- 
tist, on the other hand, does not report the 
vision of his entire self. He gives us merely 
a fragment thereof, a fragment which he has 
wilfully divorced from the rest of reality. 
Homer knew quite as well as any modern psy- 
chologist that one sees with the eyes of the 
mind, and not merely by means of the physical 
organs of sight. Now all things are beautiful, 
and should be of good report, when in their 
proper places. The hand or the leg is no less 
beautiful than the head, when joined to the 
body to which it belongs; it is gruesome when 
severed from the body. The evil-minded per- 
son is the one who bids us view the severed 
members. I have no respect for fig-leaf mor- 
ality. There is no organ of the living body, 
male or female, which offends my sense of 
modesty; on the contrary, I possess a keen en- 
109 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

joyment of all anatomical facts. But I see 
clearly that, when the whole structure of the 
body Is lost sight of in a naive admiration of 
a part, there is something unwholesome in the 
rapture. One hears of leg-shows, and in the 
spectacle of a leg-show, the degradation of our 
modern stage looms with startling distinctness. 
Is woman nothing more than the nether limbs 
of her body? Doubtless all human legs are 
entitled to friendly regard, and even respect- 
ful veneration. There is no indecency in any 
anatomical fact and to see indecency in any is 
to reveal a crude Indecency In the beholder. 
Mrs. Grundy Is not a moral philosopher; she 
Is Indeed In no noble sense moral at all, but 
merely the ugliest of old hags, the dirtiest and 
most contemptible of all mortals, always bar- 
ring the weaklings of the dust who bow low In 
her presence, and quote her as an authority 
upon moral questions; no sound moral philoso- 
phy can ever come from a person who mistakes 
moral dyspepsia for spiritual Integrity; but It 
can hardly be denied that leg-worshippers, and 
all who forsake the whole in order to give 
undivided attention to a part, are to some ex- 
tent responsible for the excesses of the Puritan 
temper, and for that temper Itself. Weakness 
110 



MORALS 

is weakness, whether it be of the Mrs. Grundys 
of both sexes, or of those whom the Mrs. 
Grundys of both sexes revile. 

One must, of course, rise superior to Mrs. 
Grundyism. Fig-leaf morality, the morality 
of the closed eyes and ears, has long raised 
the devil of a clatter among us, and is still. 
Heaven knows, only too much in evidence. It 
fears the naked truth as it fears the naked 
body, and the naked-everything-else. It prides 
itself on the wreckage of literature and of 
every form of art, that has been brought about 
through its wild crusading spirit. The Philis- 
tine does not think that his day has been well 
spent, unless he has covered a statue or a 
painting, burned a book, or commanded music 
to be silent. He goes just as far as society 
will allow him to go. The statue that he now 
drapes, he once smashed; the painting that he 
now consents to let hang in some dark corner 
of a gallery, he once slit; the book that comes 
from the publisher's shop is now received by 
him, as a rule, with nothing worse than a howl 
of impotent rage; he may no longer have his 
way with music. And yet nothing is quite safe, 
even yet. Great books are still frequently 
barred from libraries through his influence; 
111 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

they are still refused circulation through the 
mails. It is dangerous, even to-day, for book- 
stalls to expose for sale the writings of Rabe- 
lais and Boccaccio, or Burton's unexpurgated 
Arabian Nights. Great works of literature, 
when placed in schoolrooms, are mutilated. 
Havelock Ellis and Raffalovich, and many an- 
other writer dealing with the psychology of 
sex, yet belong to the Philistines' taboo. A 
sorry spectacle for gods and men is our con- 
temporary Puritanism. Philistinism — enmity 
to the light — is still its soul. 

I do not wonder that the word Morals has 
for many ears a harsh sound. It used to have 
for mine. The majesty of the ethical con- 
sciousness was almost blotted out of my vision 
by the clouds with which the Puritan spirit en- 
veloped it, even as boys blot out the sun with 
the dust which they raise on a Summer's day. 
I had to get away from all the mad Philistines 
in order to see things as they are. The moral 
law is poetry and music, but when I listened 
to the discourses of Puritan and Philistine — 
moral discourses they called them — their words 
seemed to me cacophonous, the vilest and most 
wretched concatenation of ear-splitting sounds 
that Bedlam had it in its power to evoke. I 
118 



MORALS 

could not but feel the contrast between the 
jangling discords of Philistine and Puritan 
morality, and the melody of the words which 
Shakespeare made Lorenzo pour Into the ear 
of Jessica, in that famous scene in the Mer- 
chant of Venice, after he has run away with 
the daughter of Shylock. 

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank. 

Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music 

Creep in our ears ; soft stillness and the night 

Become the touches of sweet harmony. 

Sit Jessica: Look! how the floor of heaven 

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold; 

There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest. 

But in his motion like an angel sings. 

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins: 

Such harmony is in immortal souls; 

But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay 

Doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it." 

I was born in a community where an elope- 
ment similar to the one that occurred between 
Lorenzo and Jessica would have been provoca- 
tive of a vast amount of scandal. It would 
have been regarded as a very unholy, a very 
wicked, thing. But the poetry and the music 
of these lines found me, and ever since they 
found me I have been forced to admit that 
113 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

not until people become immune to the moral 
notions of their community's Scribes and 
Pharisees, their Puritans and Philistines, do 
the music and poetry of life steal into their 
souls. Byron's poetry, and Shelley's poetry, 
we are told, are the poetry of revolt. But all 
poetry is a revolt against the conventional in 
life and morals. All poetry is a protest against 
Philistinism and a shallow Puritanism. John 
Milton would have shocked Cotton Mather al- 
most as much as Shakespeare did, if he had 
possessed the wit really to understand him. 
Milton a Puritan! Of the nobler sort, yes, 
but not of the degenerate variety which thrived 
around Massachusetts Bay, having learned 
how to exist with its blood congealed in its 
veins. Cotton Mather's poet was not Milton, 
but Michael Wigglesworth, the author of that 
gloomy epic, The Day of Doom, in which chil- 
dren were pictured as dwelling in the easiest 
abodes of Hell. Of course, Wigglesworth was 
no real poet; a man cannot be a real poet 
after he has torn his life up by the roots. 
There must be some conventional immorality 
in a man before the Muse will whisper her in- 
spiration to him; before the meaning of either 
Apollo or Christ will dawn in his mind. 
114 



MORALS 

The highest morality is never conventional. 
It is never Puritan; it is never Philistine. For 
the highest morality has to bid defiance to cus- 
tom in order to get the sweetness of poetry and 
music into life. There is little of this kind of 
morality in the statute-book, for those who 
make the laws are seldom ideal legislators or 
ideal men. The moral man is the man who 
is right when God measures him, not when his 
neighbors measure him. A great soul will al- 
ways seem immoral to the bulk of his con- 
temporaries, if they succeed in probing into his 
essence. There would have been no room in 
New England for Goethe, or Robert Burns. 
If Coleridge had lived in Boston, there would 
have been more gossip over his strange habits 
than discussion of his verse. Thoreau was not 
regarded as respectable by the good people of 
Concord. Both he and Alcott were regarded 
as no better than common loafers. And it is 
difficult to resist the impression that Concord 
would have been quite shocked out of its wits, 
if the real meaning of Emerson's words had 
penetrated to the ear of the common under- 
standing. The prophet of the Over-Soul was 
commended by his fellow-townsmen chiefly be- 
cause he revealed to them a capacity for earn- 
116 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

ing money enough to pay the butcher and 
baker and candlestick-maker, men who prized 
his money far more than they did his Trans- 
cendentalism. What a weird thing, indeed, is 
society at any given moment of time ! When- 
ever a genius is born to us, men's first thought 
is how much money will be required to enlarge 
the gaols. Of course, Jesus was crucified. 
Whenever God appears in the flesh, and genius 
is God appearing in the flesh, he is always 
crucified. The crucifixion of Jesus was the 
final revelation to Humanity of the real nature 
of the prophet and poet of Galilee. Jesus was 
moral, but his morality was not the morality of 
the Scribes and Pharisees. It was not Puritan. 
It was not Philistine. It was the morality of 
God. 

The hero who died on Golgotha was one of 
the greatest of poets. Morality is only beauti- 
ful living. When one knows how to live beau- 
tifully, one is moral. And I venture to express 
the somewhat heretical belief that most people 
do live about as well as they are permitted to 
live. It may be said, in reply, that most people 
do not live up to their own precepts, and that 
this fact proves them to be hypocrites. But 
the truth is that comparatively few people 
116 



MORALS 

understand the precepts that wag their tongues. 
Even the greatest minds do not always possess 
clear vision. When Emerson visited Thoreau 
in the Concord gaol, where the latter was lan- 
guishing for refusing to pay his taxes, he said, 
"Henry, why are you here?" to which Thoreau 
replied, "Waldo, why are you not here?" 
Both Emerson and Thoreau had taught the 
same doctrine in regard to the payment of 
taxes, and Thoreau thought that Emerson 
ought to have been as consistent as himself, 
and gone to gaol. Well, I think so, too, but 
Emerson loved the poetry of an idea better 
than the sordidness of Thoreau's fact. And 
with lesser minds, the moral precepts which 
they utter are no more real to them than are 
the hymns which the lumberjacks bawl when a 
preacher calls at the camp. A man can sing 
"Jesus lover of my soul," although he has 
never given five minutes' thought in all his life 
to the question whether he has a soul or not, 
or whether his soul, if he have one, bears any 
relation to the Nazarene. Persons often utter 
moral precepts and sing hymns to pass away 
the time. They mean nothing in particular by 
doing either. The deeds of an individual give 
the clue to his real character. That which one 
117i 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

thinks in his heart, that is what one tries to do. 
But the pressure of the environment is strong, 
and what one really thinks in his heart is usually 
what one's neighbors are thinking in their 
hearts. One quotes the great precepts of the 
moral philosophers very much as a poll-parrot 
quotes all that he hears, but neither the average 
individual nor the poll-parrot is much edified 
by the words that cross their lips. The really 
difficult, and all but impossible, thing for most 
people is to desire a righteousness that shall 
exceed the righteousness of those by whom 
they are surrounded. To be as good as one's 
neighbors, but no better, is the ideal that takes 
root in the average mind. It is a very safe 
ideal, for the majority love high excellence no 
better than they love the worst forms of crimi- 
nality. To be a mediocrity in the field of 
moral endeavor, this is the desire of the aver- 
age citizen; that he shall be such a mediocrity 
is the desire of the community that rears him. 
One's conduct depends upon the game that 
the community plays with one's ideal. The 
sophisticated poor man may learn to think that 
the game is not worth the candle, and refuse 
to play it according to the rules. The criminal 
is born of this despair, and perhaps a charitable 
118 



MORALS 

person will not feel like blaming him too se- 
verely. I confess to some feeling of sympathy 
for him. It is well for the progress of the 
world that men often refuse to be ultra-moral. 
The only way to obtain an improvement of 
evil conditions is to rebel against the existing 
order. The poor man of Robert Burns' day 
looked forward to death with a sense of relief. 

"O Death, the poor man's dearest friend — 
The kindest and the best. 
Welcome the hour my aged limbs 
Are laid with thee at rest. 
The great, the wealthy, fear thy blow. 
From pomp and pleasure torn; 
But, oh, a blest relief to those 
That weary-laden mourn." 

These lines of Robert Burns have for our time 
an ancient look. To-day the poor man does 
not look to death for relief from his woes, but 
he joins a labor union, or becomes a Socialist, 
or, perhaps, an Anarchist. He is not afraid 
to go out on a strike, and, if his temper be hot, 
he may throw stones and destroy his employer's 
property. Very wicked this, many folks say, 
and very wicked it may be, but even wicked- 
ness may find in conditions a partial justifica- 
tion for itself. If the reader considers only the 
119 



v* 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

guillotine and the massacres, the story of the 
French Revolution will not make very pleasant 
reading. But when he learns how the poor suf- 
fered, through the tyranny of those who tow- 
ered for centuries above them, his reflections 
are not likely to be tinged with so much regret, 
as he turns over many a sanguinary page. If 
those in power will not do justly by those be- 
neath them in social position, then it is highly 
advisable that they get a dose of their own 
bitterest medicine. There are times when we 
should be mild and turn the other cheek to the 
smiter, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred, 
it is better that the smiter get well-smitten in 
return. For, after he has received his punish- 
ment, he Is not likely to find smiting such 
pleasant exercise for his animal spirits. Those 
animal spirits, indeed, will have received a 
much-needed chastening. 

I have no respect for the notion, so popular 
among us to-day, that there is no such thing 
as evil. That doctrine may, or may not, be 
a truth of metaphysics. But Humanity cannot 
live on metaphysics, in this gross earth of ours. 
Here actuality means more than metaphysical 
reality. Pain may not be real, but It Is actual, 
and none but a fool will deny it. There Is 
120 



MORALS 

evil in the world. There is vastly more evil 
than good. The essence of life, as mortals 
know it, is a conflict between different ideals; 
we are in the midst of 

"Right and wrong 
Between whose endless jar justice resides." 

Every step in advance that the race has taken, 
and every step that it will take in advance in 
the future, has been, and will be, fought by 
forces that desired to keep the human mind 
back. Individually and collectively alike, 
progress means warfare between moral con- 
ceptions, whose natures are irreconcilable. 
There is indeed no Absolute Morality in the 
world to command our allegiance. There are 
millions of individual moralities, for every in- 
dividual is a law unto himself, and the morals 
of the crowd are nothing more than customs 
which have grown up slowly, and which the 
mass would force upon the individual as habits 
to be honored and observed. Some of these 
habits — most of them, indeed — we have in- 
herited, others are imbibed from a growing 
sentiment of environment, others still are 
purely individual, born of solitary meditation 
and unique experience. Every person has his 
121 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

private moral code, not all of which has been 
inspired from Sinai, or other sacred peak. In 
the clash of code against code, it cannot justly 
be claimed that all right is ever found upon 
one side alone. The Southerner who believed 
that slavery was a divine institution, and the 
Northerner who believed that slavery was an 
abomination, could both present very effective 
arguments for their points of view. There 
was right upon both sides; there was wrong 
upon both. And so has it ever been, and so 
will it ever be, throughout the course of human 
events. Let us beware how we stigmatize the 
actions of our opponents! An American may 
rejoice, and should rejoice, in the success of 
Washington In the Revolution of 1776, but he 
who tries to asperse the motives of the Loyal- 
ists, who refused to rebel against King George 
and the mother country, does violence to the 
facts, for they were not the vile traitors to 
their country that shallow American historians 
have loved to portray them. Patriotism would 
have it so, but Impartial investigations have 
shown that the Loyalists were often of the 
highest type of character, while many a patriot 
of the day was little better than a rowdy. All 
persons are entitled to justice, and there is 
123 



MORALS 

grave danger in dividing them into sheep and 
goats, because closest inspection will often fail 
to reveal which is which, and, besides, individ- 
uals will be found changing places from day to 
day. The immoral of yesterday are the moral 
of to-day, and the moral of to-day will be the 
immoral of to-morrow. Morality often ap- 
pears to be nothing more than a will-o'-the- 
wisp. 

A will-o'-the-wisp I fancy that morality al- 
ways is. A virtue is only some old sin that 
has become common. A sin is a virtue that 
has become obsolete in good society. What 
are we to do? It was not a crime to steal in 
ancient Sparta, if one could steal without being 
detected; it was held to be a virtue rather, 
for stealing sharpened the wit so useful in war- 
fare. But I may not steal that my wit may be 
sharpened, and what wit-sharpener can I find 
to take its place? Cultured Athens smiled 
upon practices, and believed them half-divine, 
or wholly so, that in subsequent years caused 
men to be sent to the flames, the gallows and 
life-imprisonment. Can it be that a virtue of 
ancient Athens is a sin in America or England? 
By the standard of morals now counted ortho- 
dox a virtue of an elder period has most as- 
123 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

suredly become a sin of the present. Painful 
as the reflection must be to one who knows that 
his debt to the Greek classics is a debt greater 
than he will ever be able to pay, there is no 
gainsaying the fact that the greatest of the 
ancient poets and philosophers and artists 
would be regarded to-day as criminals in Lon- 
don and New York. And yet the distance be- 
tween the Age of Pericles and now is not as 
great as some may fondly imagine. Did I 
speak of a sin as a former virtue which had 
become obsolete in good society? Surely I was 
jesting. There is nothing which ever was that 
is obsolete in the world. There is no good 
society. We prate of evolution; evolution is 
more than half a myth. All the virtues are 
hoary with age. All the sins find a happy 
hunting ground in the modern world. There 
is not a vice known to ancient Egypt or Babylon 
that has been stamped out. All the sleuths 
are busy still. The face of the Devil is no 
whiter to-day than it was six thousand years 
ago, nor any blacker. At his best, the archfiend 
of our mythology has always been a gentleman ; 
at his worst, he has always been very much 
like the rest of us. Genial to a fault, I find 
him in every society, good or bad, that I enter, 
124 



MORALS 

shaking hands with the aristocratic few, or the 
democratic many, with the most serene and im- 
perturbable impartiality, and doubtless he will 
be successful in preserving his unique character 
to the end of time. 

Perhaps the reader who has followed me 
thus far will fancy that I am jesting now. 
If so, let me hasten to assure him that I was 
never more serious. Do not despise me for 
my good-natured attitude, for there is nothing 
so difficult to acquire! It is easy to abuse 
everybody, and everything. When it serves 
my purpose, I am an adept at that sort of 
thing myself, and there are occasions when in- 
vective is a very effective weapon. Still it is 
not a magnet to draw the affections of man- 
kind to oneself, and there are times when one 
desires to accomplish that end. Within the 
field of my consciousness I behold a world of 
men and women, with some of whom I would 
like to be on good terms all of the time, and 
with all of whom I would like to be on good 
terms some of the time. At this particular 
moment I desire to be on good terms with 
them all. I would see their virtues large, and 
their vices small; nay, if I might, by some 
subtile spiritual chemistry, work the miracle, I 
US 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

would occasionally transform the mentalities of 
mankind so that these apparent vices would be 
as resplendent as the real virtues. Like Whit- 
man, I cry out to be relieved of distinctions. 
I would see the saints and sinners as much alike 
In their features as are the peas in a pod. And 
they are. My saints live only in my creative 
imagination. My sinners are the daily compan- 
ions of my existence. All the men and women to 
whom I owe pleasant hours are sinners. They 
have written the books that I read, painted the 
pictures and carved the statues that I see, and 
composed the music that I hear. When my 
sorrows seemed greater than I could bear, it 
was they who brought me cheer. I have en- 
joyed their dinners; I have thanked them when 
they put gold in my empty purse. Sinners! 
What does it matter if the author of the 
Twenty-third Psalm committed adultery. If 
Lord Bacon took bribes, if Shakespeare got 
drunk? Their sins have all passed away, and 
none among the living are any the worse be- 
cause they were committed ; but the Psalm, the 
Essays and Kin^ Lear are our delight forever. 
And it may be that the things of art, of litera- 
ture, and, Indeed, all of the Inspirations of 
life that we most prize were born, and continue 
126 



MORALS 

to be born, out of human sins no less than 
human virtues. I confess that I have some- 
times thought that virtue alone is sterile, and 
that sin alone is sterile, but that, out of their 
indissoluble union in the flesh, all the heroic 
deeds, the godlike aspirations, and the intellec- 
tual searchings of the spirit have come. 

Like my brethren of a sterner temper, I am 
a moralist, for the germs of all moralities are 
in my blood. There is probably no sin that 
has ever been committed whose germ is not 
to be found somewhere within my psychology; 
there is probably no virtue whose germ is not 
in my mind also. What I am, I am. I have 
no apologies to make. Do I indulge in sinful 
frolic? When the fit is on me I do. But 
there are also days when I am as austere as 
any Puritan. Then I am anchored fast to all 
the moralities. But there are other times when 
I must laugh at all the sombre virtues. There 
is, indeed, a ludicrous side to them all. No 
man is consistent. Life is not. I play with 
words, just as Humanity has always played 
with them. I contradict myself, when the time 
or the mood calls for contradiction. There 
is no fool in the world like habit. Millions 
call themselves moral, because they move in a 
127 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

Stupid rut from which they have not the wit 
to emerge. To me it is apparent that the per- 
son who always observes the same customs, 
day after day, and year after year, is no wiser 
than a versifier who, after writing some stanzas, 
should rewrite them eternally, with never the 
thought of a fresh inspiration, or an individual 
who had become so enamored of one viand 
that he would never eat any other. One may 
have so much respect for Moses as to have 
none for oneself. It is easier, of course, to 
accept the Decalogue of another than to create 
a Decalogue for oneself, but the great man is 
one who is never weary of his own mental ac- 
tivity. Moses is not a safe teacher for an 
aspiring generation. To accept him with the 
heart would mean the destruction of sculpture, 
and of other noble things. Morality is seldom 
an art, but true morality always is an art. 
Everything should be an art. And, to be an 
art, a thing has to be individual. The great 
moralists of all ages have been artists, but 
their less enlightened followers have stooped 
to be mere artisans. The Master always pos- 
sesses a freshness that gets lost in the disciple 
who tries to walk in his footsteps. That is why 
a great sinner like Napoleon is admired m( re 
128 



MORALS 

than a sickly saint. The former has lived from 
the inspiration found within himself; the latter 
has tried to make an exotic atmosphere the 
breath of his spiritual nostrils. There are sins 
that attract, just as there are virtues that repel. 
There may have been a sinless Buddha once, 
but what avails it, if his sinlessness brought the 
annihilation of Nirvana? A virtue which has 
no life In it is a monstrosity. A sinless being, 
one who had reconciled all the antinomies of 
his nature, drunk dry all the wells of truth, 
and digested all the fruits of beauty that grow 
in the cosmic orchards, would be poor com- 
pany for a live man or a live god, for his eyes 
and ears from that time forth for evermore 
would be closed, while his tongue would be 
dumb from ennui. There would be nothing 
more for him to do, and he would have no 
further need of existence. Our hope of im- 
mortality is really based on a conviction that 
the individual will never leave his Imperfection 
behind, but, impelled by his burden of sin on 
the one hand, and his aspiration for virtue on 
the other, is destined to climb eternally a hill 
that has no summit, a hill that God heightens 
whenever a step upward has been taken. 

It will doubtless seem to many of my readers 
129 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

that I have presented in this essay no lofty con- 
ception of morality, and if any one expected 
me to lay down a moral code he has been 
doomed to disappointment. I have no code 
of morals which I desire to lay down for 
others to follow. He who has mastered the 
secret of life knows that the secret is not one 
that can be universally blabbed. The secret 
of life is individual. All possess it, but no two 
have the same secret. Be yourself, then! 
Make your own code of morals! Genius is 
God. The ideal is God. And as one learns 
to respect his own genius, and to be guided by 
his own ideal, he becomes a master, and not a 
servant, of life. To me, as well as to Tenny- 
son, the object of existence has been 

"To search thro' all I felt or saw, 
The springs of life, the depths of awe, 
And reach the law within the law." 

The conclusion at which I have arrived may 
seem surprisingly simple, too simple, it may be, 
for those who love complexity, because some 
day they hope to master it, and thus tower 
menacingly above their fellows. I see truth 
in all men. I see beauty in all men. I see 
goodness in all men. There is no Absolute 
130 



MORALS 

Morality common to all Individuals, because 
every Individual is his own Absolute. "Sub- 
limity," said Longinus, "is the echo of a great 
soul." And it is within the power of every 
person to be great, and hence sublime. There 
may be those w^ho would rejoice to see all the 
mountain-peaks of the world piled on top of 
one another, so that there would no longer be, 
as now, thousands of individual mountains, 
each with its own inalienably unique character, 
but one heaven-piercing mountain only; if such 
there be, I have no quarrel with them, but I 
am not of their number. I perceive the blessed- 
ness of limitations ; am thankful, indeed, for my 
own. To be is enough. Why should one wish 
to be another? Pleasant is the give and take 
of life, when giver and taker alike glow with 
their own heroic light, and breathe forth their 
own music. He who lives a life that is poetry 
and music is as moral as one needs to be. He 
may not seem so to the generation that is blind 
to the poetry of him, and deaf to the music 
of him, but to every richly-endowed man such 
a one is moral. The codes we learn to throw 
away, habits we learn to spurn; but whatso- 
ever is sweet and harmonious and full of color 
is of the morality of the future. There are 
131 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

no fixed rules. Life is fluid; it is an experi- 
ment, of which we are the experimenters. This 
may seem a very immoral point of view to all 
who have come to believe that Morality is a 
Procrustean Bed to which all must be fitted, 
quite irrespective of their ethical dimensions. 
But this conception of morality is already out 
of date among all who dare to think for them- 
selves. It was a conception that did far more 
harm than good, and does to-day where it still 
prevails. For morality requires breadth and 
depth and height; although it often seems in 
these latter days to be lacking in every de- 
sideratum. To the old Roman the virtuous 
were the courageous, and it were well if that 
were the modern view. Our ethical standard 
ought to bear in mind the good of the indi- 
vidual and the race alike, but unfortunately one 
or the other is usually left out of consideration. 
Morals were made for man; not for morals 
was man made. At the present time our moral 
code is chiefly concerned in bolstering up prop- 
erty rights, and certain institutions, and it never 
occurs to the average mind to consider whether 
the institution or vested right is one which de- 
serves to endure or not. Government, prop- 
erty, and the family are the special pets of 
133 



MORALS 

the moral mongers. But one has a right to 
call in question the right of any or all of these 
institutions to endure; one has a right to call 
in question any institution that may exist. Too 
long has Humanity been chained to the stakes 
that men now dead drove into the moral soil 
of their eras; too long has Humanity been 
crucified in order to gratify some ancient tyran- 
nical impulse. Conformity has been regarded 
as a virtue; non-conformity a sin. Well, so 
be it. But let us not forget that conventional 
virtue may be weakness, and that the sinners 
have given to the world all of its force. How 
can we get the most out of life? is the ques- 
tion which every person should ask, when con- 
sidering moral questions. If the conventional 
code will enable us to get the most out of life, 
then it ought to be respected and conserved; 
but if, on the other hand, the rebel has dis- 
covered some gold of character, or pearl of 
truth, hitherto overlooked, the code, if it stands 
in the way of a universal recognition of the 
discovery, ought to perish. It is always per- 
missible to be a traitor to the old moralities 
when a fairer morality has dawned within the 
ethical consciousness. New problems have come 
which only new wisdom can solve, and if the 
133 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

new wine of thought bursts the old bottles of 
morality, then the old bottles must be relegated 
to the world's moral scrap-heap. To me the 
most sickening chapters in the history of man 
are those that tell the story of how individual 
genius has been crushed by the moral ortho- 
doxies of the time. Even though it be granted 
that the old way of living be best for the ma- 
jority, it does not follow that it is best for 
everybody, and it should not preclude the su- 
perior person from living in accordance with 
his new ideal. Why should all persons be 
expected to live after the same fashion? No 
two are cast in quite the same mould. Why 
then should we insist upon a single standard of 
morals? 

Where would we be to-day, if it had not been 
for the bold, defiant rebels of society, the great 
sinners of the past, whose dogmas are now 
accepted as tests of morality? And the thing 
that has been is the thing that shall be. Other 
great rebels — sinners — will come; nay, are 
already at our gates, whose doctrines, now 
condemned, shall be a part of the morality that 
is to come. I am not one who regards 
Nietzsche's praise of the Overman as the final 
word of ethics, but there is something to be 
134 



MORALS 

said in behalf of his ideal. Whenever a per- 
son comes to us with a new song to sing, a 
new picture to exhibit, or a new philosophy to 
expound, violence is done, both to him and to 
ourselves, if he be prejudged by an ethical code 
that passed muster with previous generations. 
Our morals are never absolute; they are always 
relative, and destined to pass away when the 
need for them is gone. Morality is only the 
soil in which Humanity takes root and grows. 
And sometimes this soil becomes thin and poor, 
refusing to nourish other than a stunted human 
crop, just as the soil of a farmer's field becomes 
thin and poor, after it has nourished vegetable 
growths for a number of seasons. There was 
a truth expressed by the Puritan temper, there 
was a reason for the ascetic ideal, and there is 
no just reason for condemning one for living 
in accordance with his puritanical, or ascetic, 
ideal, if this ideal be of his nature. But few 
men are by nature Puritans, or ascetics. Most 
persons require a richer ethical diet than the 
harsh moral doctors would allow them. And 
if they resolve to be the masters of their fate, 
the captains of their souls, they are acting quite 
within their rights, and, in the long run, it will 
be discovered that they acted for the higher 
135 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

interests of Humanity as well. This is not said 
to justify loose ways of living; it is said to 
justify the masters of life who have felt the 
poetry and heard the music of existence, to 
which others have been blind and deaf. Genius 
is always — for itself — the Supreme Court, 
from which no appeal can be taken. Lesser 
minds may rave and fume at its so-called im- 
morality, but their raving and fuming will 
prove, in the end, to have been impotent. And 
every person possesses a genius of his own, if 
he will but search for it, a sacred fount, from 
which flows the rill of his inspiration, unique 
and divine. Some day when we shall have 
attained unto a higher wisdom than is now 
generally known, the question that will be asked 
of one another will be, not Have you kept your 
neighbor's law, but Have you kept your own? 
And, if so, what new truth or beauty or good- 
ness has been born out of your experience? 
For we are destined to believe in progress, to 
rest assured that 

"The old order changetli, yielding place to new. 
And God fulfils himself in many ways. 
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." 



136 



SEX 

QEX is rapidly becoming to the modern mind 
one of the crassest of superstitions, and is 
resulting in a considerable degree of malevo- 
lence. I do not mean to deny the vital impor- 
tance of sex in the economy of life, but I do 
wish to assert that there is danger in the 
apotheosis of sex which is now going on. Too 
much time and energy is wasted through mak- 
ing a fetish of it. To exaggerate the impor- 
tance of sex is a folly of youth, and a disgrace 
of ill-tutored age. In our day it is beginning 
to count for more than the universe, and is be- 
coming the basis of religion. It is the theme 
of most of our fiction, our drama is drenched 
with it, and our verse is sadly affected. It 
vitiates the very air we breathe. 

Perhaps what I have said will be denounced 
by the unreflecting and the unobservant as a 
miserable piece of cynicism on my part, but I 
submit that it is only an unvarnished recital of 
fact. There is, indeed, plenty of lip-worship 
137 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

which speaks of other than sexual gods and 
goddesses, and there are still men who do not 
worship in the groves of Baal. But they are 
a little out of touch with the intellectual and 
sensational life of the time. Probably at no 
period in human history did sex mean quite 
as much as it means to-day, when paganism and 
its gods are supposed to be gone, and almost 
forgotten, and Christianity and its ascetic ideals 
in the ascendant. That a great truth may be 
discovered ultimately in sex worship I shall not 
attempt to deny; on the contrary, I think that 
I have glimpsed it. But not until sex recedes 
a little from our vision shall we see even the 
beauty of sex for what it is. One never quite 
knows what a person has meant to him, until 
a separation has taken place. We honor the 
dead, because we have come to see them for 
what they were; because we see them as they 
never were seen when they shared with us the 
burden and heat of the day. 

I do not object to sex-worship in itself. I 
have stood at its altar; have myself been a 
worshipper, and am, in a measure, one even 
yet. But I am not a Monotheist ; I am a Poly- 
theist. I have many gods, and some goddesses. 
My temple is the Pantheon. I bow low when- 
138 



SEX 

ever I stand before a Holy Image. But I 
am a Catholic, and insist that there shall be 
no neglect of any divinity or saint. As one 
who reverences the universal, I am jealous 
when I see the universe sacrificed to an earth, 
the whole to a part. And that is what the 
sex-worship of to-day really does. It sacrifices 
the greater things to the smaller. It has con- 
secrated a narrow amativeness, which has 
wrought havoc with literature, with art, and 
even love itself. Within its consuming fire the 
interest which men used to take in men has 
largely vanished. Friendship in the large 
heroic sense has almost passed away. No one 
could do anything to help poor Burns in his 
misfortune, said Carlyle, in his essay on the 
poet, because heroic friendship had ceased to 
be regarded as a virtue. And not only has 
heroic friendship between man and man passed 
away, but all the larger heroisms of man are 
passing away likewise. Man is no longer heroic 
in his religion, his philosophy, his ideals of life. 
He no longer seeks to scale the heights where 
dwell the gods. He no longer feels the thrills 
of the larger romanticism. Friendship is not 
for the modern a sky-piercing hill of romance, 
and brotherhood shrinks quickly, if any strong 
139 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

demand is made upon it. A novel or a drama 
which should incarnate the adventures of some 
new Orestes and Pylades, or Damon and 
Pythias, is a novel that would be likely to go 
unread, a drama that would certainly remain 
unacted. The story of a man who walked in 
loneliness all the days of his life in search of 
the Holy Grail, or to get nearer to the source 
of all terrestrial things, would stir no en- 
thusiasm among the readers of popular fiction. 
The tale of a celibate Christ of the twentieth 
century would seem to them the acme of dull- 
ness. There must be a swish of skirts in every 
book, and upon every stage, to attract the at- 
tention of the multitude. There is a desire 
that the impact of sex upon sex may every- 
where be felt. There must be love and mar- 
riage, and the living happily ever after, or a di- 
vorce court as a preliminary to more passionate 
love-making and subsequent marriage. If this 
condition of things be an ideal, the ideal has 
been realized. But I cannot accept it as one. 
It seems to me that we are doing obeisance to 
an idol. 

It seems to me that we are doing obeisance 
to an idol that keeps us from the largeness 
of life. When the two members of a pair 
140 



SEX 

are regarded as the absolute complements of 
each other, the wretchedness of the view is at 
once apparent to me. I recall that wise word 
of Emerson: "Heaven is not the union of a 
pair; it is the communion of all souls." Pairs! 
Is that the object of life? Is life satisfied 
when she has paired us off, so that each has 
one mate and no more ? A man and a woman, 
or two men, or two women — have we found in 
this romantic love, or this romantic friendship, 
the end of romance, and the fulfilment of the 
divine purpose? There are doubtless many 
who will say yes, but I say no. Like Shelley, 

"I never was attached to that great sect 
Whose doctrine is that each one should select 
Out of the world a mistress or a friend. 
And all the rest, tho' fair and wise, commend 
To cold oblivion — tho' 'tis in the code 
Of modern morals." 

Life is too full of grandeur to be narrowed 
in our thought with impunity. There are other 
things than sex; things other than pairs. And 
he who would feast on the teeming riches of 
the globe must often travel far from the bridal 
chamber and the fireside. The man or woman 
who believes that in another has been found 
all the richness of life has no true acquaintance 
141 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

with life. Let us admit that each has found 
in the other a piece of pure gold. But are 
there no other pieces of pure gold? Nay, are 
there not pearls, rubies and other precious 
stones? And is not a piece of pure gold a 
very meagre portion for one who has imagined 
treasuries deep with shining coins? "She is all 
the world to me," one hears, that and the 
feminine equivalent thereof. Ah ! well, some 
persons are content with a very little. They 
doubtless feel more at home in a world which 
they can clasp in their arms than in one which 
requires days to go around. There were many 
who felt lonely when Copernicus shattered the 
spheres of Ptolemy, and opened a vista into 
infinitude. But will it be said that I desire 
to rob people of their poetry and music? That 
would be to do me a grave injustice. I would 
that all men might see the poetry and hear the 
music that may be seen and heard in every 
bright and shining aspect of nature, if we 
but open our eyes and ears wide, and cease 
to shut ourselves up with a lonely fiddle, when 
the orchestra of All-Souls would begin to play. 
But let me indulge now, for a little time, in 
what will seem like a palinode. For the reality 
of sex almost justifies the superstition con- 
142 



SEX 

cerning It, which is so common in our time, 
but not quite. Wisely did Whitman speak, 
when he said that the men and women he 
knew and liked were those who knew and 
avowed the deliciousness of their sex. Why, 
indeed, should we not know and avow it? We 
are men — let us rejoice in our manhood! We 
are women — let us rejoice in our womanhood! 
There is nothing in the physiology of sex, of 
which we need to feel ashamed. There is, on 
the contrary, everything to give us a sense of 
pride. There is, for example, the lively sense 
of creation that dwells in our sexual physiology. 
Not every one may write a great book, or com- 
pose music, or build a cathedral, or pile up 
a fortune. But to nearly all is given the power 
to be a father or a mother. Ah ! what do we 
not owe to this mysterious thing which we call 
sex? All who tread the globe, all who now 
sleep within its bosom, all who shall in the fu- 
ture inherit it, owe, or did, or will, owe to sex 
the joy that comes from communion with 
flower-spotted meads, rolling waters, stalwart 
mountains and the over-arching sky. The 
Dialogues of Plato, the Metaphysic of Aris- 
totle, the Parables of Jesus, the Divine Comedy 
of Dante, the laughter of Cervantes, the humor 
143 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

and pathos of Shakespeare, the sage wisdom of 
Goethe, the Symphonies of Beethoven, the Art 
of Pheidias and Michelangelo and Raphael, 
have all come to us through the narrow gate- 
way of birth. A man and a woman had to 
cooperate to bring these marvels to earth. 
There Is not a truth, nor a good, nor a sense 
of the beautiful, which does not owe a debt to 
sex. I do not wonder that the Venusberg has 
become a holy hill. I am not surprised at any 
of the excesses of phallic worship. For here 
am I in this beautiful old world, listening, with 
the deepest of raptures, to the singing of birds, 
and viewing the gorgeous magnificence of the 
dawn and eventide, drinking in, with a subtile 
sense of intoxication, the fragrance of the lilies, 
and bathed day and night in grandeurs that 
paralyze my poor organs of speech when I 
would voice them, because of sex. There is 
not a joy which I recall that does not bear 
witness to sex. The friends I love, the books 
that have inspired me, the thoughts and emo- 
tions that have filled me with raptures ineffable, 
were born, because physiology was not despised 
and rejected, but accepted and loved. What 
wonder that the poor monk and nun have often 
been regarded as the enemies of the human 
144 



SEX 

race, as they deliberately averted their faces 
from the mysteries of procreation, and covered 
them with veils and hoods ! 

No; there is nothing in the flesh of which 
one should feel ashamed. There is no inde- 
cency in nudity. I met once an old gentleman, 
the author of a critical work on Jesus, who 
thought differently. He regarded himself as 
a liberal in religious matters. He did not be- 
lieve in the immortality of the soul. He was, 
so far as I could see, an out-and-out Material- 
ist. But this venerable gentleman was pained 
by every reference to nudity in nature. He 
could not understand why Whitman should 
have felt it necessary to refer to the summer 
night as naked. He believed that nature was 
the mother of man, and that man ought to be 
ashamed of his origin. I used to know an 
English Materialist who was also very pro- 
nounced in his abhorrence of nudity. For a 
long time I was puzzled to conceive why these 
men, so materialistic in their philosophies of 
life, should have been so squeamish in their at- 
titude toward matter. But it dawned upon me 
at last that a Materialist with refined instincts 
was just the person to be shocked by the gross- 
ness of nature. Believing, as he must, that 
145 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

all is to end in naught, that nature does but 
bring to life, in order to bring to death again, 
it becomes apparent why nature may wear a 
hateful aspect to his eyes, and nudity, as a 
manifestation of this power to bring into exist- 
ence forms destined to perish everlastingly, 
seem shocking. But to one who views nature 
and life from a spiritual point of view, nudity 
ought to be regarded as a glorious thing to look 
upon. It is good to look upon our own; it is 
good to look upon the nudity of others. Presi- 
dent Hall, of Clark University, has said that 
it is beneficial for a boy to strip in the presence 
of the man who is going to give him a physical 
examination. I am sure that he is right, and 
that it is also beneficial for boys and men alike 
to strip in one another's presence in the 
gymnasium, or on the banks of the swimming- 
pool, for a large amount of prudery, of 
squeamishness, of mock-modesty, is, in this 
way, dissipated. And, besides, to view a human 
body which is finely moulded possesses all the 
virtue that may be found in viewing a beautiful 
statue. A race of men who enjoyed thoroughly 
one another's physical perfections would be 
almost civilized. They would stand at an in- 
tellectual and aesthetic height that has not been 
146 



SEK 

attained since the time of the Greeks. When 
William Blake and his wife sat in strict nudity 
in their garden, on the night that the caller 
arrived, they did not shock any holy angel, 
and it were well, if there were more persons 
like the artist-poet and his wife. 

I shall never forget the impression that the 
electric poems of Whitman in regard to the 
body made upon me years ago. I saw quickly 
that the real stuff of poetry was in them, that 
they were poems rich with truth too seldom 
realized. I saw in these poems the fine thought 
and feeling of one who was not afraid of sex — 
not even of his own. They came to me like 
a cool fresh breeze at the end of a sultry day. 
They opened up for me new vistas into the 
joy of life, for they sang into my soul the 
eternal beauty of the flesh. I saw through 
them that the flesh was not one thing, and the 
spirit another, but that the flesh did but reveal, 
in some measure, the underlying spirit; that 
fleshly bodies were as spiritual as the spiritual 
body of which Paul speaks, if we may assume 
it to have existed outside of his creative imagi- 
nation. After reading Whitman, it became im- 
possible longer to listen to those who regarded 
the flesh, and the facts of the flesh, with ab- 
147 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

horrence; impossible, too, to regard sex as in 
itself a confession of sin. And, at this junc- 
ture, I would call attention to one of the most 
baleful features discovered in the superstitious 
worship of sex. For, while millions find in sex 
their highest, and perhaps only, divinity, there 
yet remains in many of these minds a haunting 
suspicion that the god, or goddess, of their 
idolatry is, after all, only a delightful devil, 
yet malicious at heart, and to be worshipped 
in secret rather than in public. And this is 
why so many repudiate in public all that they 
have done or whispered in private. Their 
fears make hypocrites of them. But there is 
no sin in acknowledging joyfully the pride that 
one feels in his own sex, or in the satisfaction 
derived from the other. 

While I am not sympathetically disposed to- 
ward some of the ultra sex-notions of our time, 
so wonderful is sex, even when considered most 
rationally, that I can quite understand them. 
The good that comes to us from sex is so real 
and vital that it is not strange if many forget 
the river of life, and even the supernatural 
source of this river, when surveying the fountain 
from which it first emerges to the earthly view. 
But to cut short this digression, I would call 
148 



SEX 

attention to the fact that sex is a distinctive 
feature of all human bodies, except the bodies 
of children, and that the minds of adults are 
not epicene. The bodies of men and women 
have likenesses to each other, too. Not only 
do they possess the various organs which they 
share together, as human beings, but there is 
not so much difference in the distinctive organs 
of sex as a superficial appearance would indi- 
cate. The clitoris in women, for example, is 
really nothing more than an undeveloped penis, 
and the prostate gland in man is held by some 
physiological theorists to be but a rudimentary 
womb. Man has the rudiments of the female 
mammary glands, and in rare instances these 
have been quite fully developed. As this is 
not an essay on the physiology of sex, I need 
not dwell at length upon this side of the sexual 
problem, but it ought to be definitely under- 
stood that sex is not understandable if we omit 
the consideration of the physiological factors. 
Instinct is always based upon organization, and 
there is not a sexual impulse that is anything 
more than the pressure of physiological neces- 
sity. Man rises above physiology in his great 
imaginings, in his mighty ratiocinations, and in 
his idealistic visions. But in his sexual nature 
149 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

he is, like the creatures below him, the victim 
of his organization, and consequently a thing 
of instinct. The sympathetic psychology which 
is possessed by man for woman, and by woman 
for man, is occasioned by a tyrannous physio- 
logical mandate. And, when I observe how 
wide the range of variation between members 
of the same sex is, it becomes evident to me 
how a little excess at this point, or a little de- 
ficiency at that, may produce the homo-sexual- 
ist of both sexes, or the psycho-sexual herma- 
phrodite of both. Male and female are alike 
in difference, and there is hardly a greater dif- 
ference between the members of one sex, as 
compared with the members of the other, than 
there is between the members of one sex when 
considered with reference to one another. 
There are women whose clitoris is abnormally 
large; there are men whose penis is abnormally 
small. There are men who are largely en- 
dowed with feminine traits; there are women 
who are largely endowed with masculine traits. 
In barbarous societies the differences between 
the sexes are said to be less than in civilized 
societies, and probably the statement is per- 
fectly true; but the same statement can also 
be made in respect to the individuals who 
150 



SEX 

compose barbarous and civilized societies. In 
civilized communities masculine ideals win 
women, and feminine ideals win men. Speak- 
ing psychologically, it is sometimes hard to de- 
termine which is the man, and which the 
woman. Which was the man, and which the 
woman, in that pair of which Chopin and 
George Sand were the members? Dr. Hedge 
said that Dr. Channing had a feminine mind. 
The tenderness of Gautama was feminine, and 
was not Jesus very much of a woman in some 
of his characteristics? Goethe said that there 
was something feminine in all genius, while 
Coleridge went further, declaring that the mind 
of a genius must be androgynous. Tennyson 
dared in The Princess to prophesy that the 
sexes were destined to become more and more 
alike. 

"Yet in the long run liker must they grow; 
The man be more of woman, she of man; 
He gain in sweetness and in moral height^ — 
Nor lose in wrestling thews that throw the world; 
She mental breadth, nor fail in childhood care; 
Nor lose the childlike in the higher mind." 

There is much in this thought expressed by 

Tennyson that will displease those who desire 

to see the sexes kept as far apart as possible. 

151 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

But there is only one way to keep men ultra- 
masculine, and women ultra-feminine, and that 
consists in keeping the sexes segregated. The 
strong-minded woman is here, and so is the 
man who is almost half a woman, or even 
more than half. We grow into the nature 
of what we worship, and sex-worship is destined 
to produce some strange, and, at one time, 
unforeseen results. There is already a con- 
siderable amalgamation of the sexes, and there 
will be more. There may be differences 
destined to be eternal, but who will dare to 
prophesy even this? Woman is said to be an 
undeveloped man, but there are indications that 
woman is going to develop. 

I have said that sex is a distinguishing char- 
acteristic of all bodies except those of children. 
I believe that the truth of this statement is not 
as well known as it should be. Few as the 
anatomical differences of sex are, the glamor of 
sex is found pervading the entire body of a 
man or woman. The hand of a man may be 
as soft as the hand of a woman, but it does not 
lose thereby a distinctively masculine touch, if 
the man himself be thoroughly masculine. Sex 
is discovered in the tactile sensibility of bodies. 
Contrary to the usually accepted opinion, the 
152 



SEX 

tactile sensibility of man is greater than that 
of woman, just as the tactile sensibility of a 
civilized person is greater than that of a savage. 
It would be interesting, in this connection, to 
ascertain whether the tactile sensibility of the 
masculine type of woman is greater than the 
tactile sensibility of the more normal type, and 
that of the effeminate man less. Woman's love 
for man appears to be largely a kind of long- 
ing, a desire to be lifted up and glorified; the 
love of man for woman is based upon his tactile 
sensibility. The male is always a reservoir of 
physical passion; the passion of woman needs 
the stimulus of artificial excitement. There 
would be little attraction between men and 
women, if women were as cold and devoid of 
passion, save at stated intervals, as the female 
animals are ; and there is evidence that, through 
intimate contact with men, women are develop- 
ing in warmth of passional ardor. Perhaps the 
sexual Irregularities which are aired so fre- 
quently in the divorce courts of our time are 
largely the product of this increased passional 
attraction. Formerly men associated more 
with men, and women with women; there was 
less association between the sexes than now; 
men, indeed, rather preferred the association 
153 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

of their own sex to that of the other, as a man 
who is a little old-fashioned often does to-day. 
The new intimacy, it must be confessed, is 
changing both men and women very fast — a 
little to their hurt, it may be. For a race in 
which women were allowed to sit on thrones 
and be queens, while men no longer essayed the 
role of kings, would be nothing short of a 
calamity, and something of this sort we are 
witnessing at the present time in America. 

Nevertheless, men, no less than women, have 
gained much through contact with the opposite 
sex. No words can adequately express the 
debt which men owe to their mothers, and often 
to the other female members of the family into 
which they were born. To their wives, and 
other women met in later life, they have not, 
as a rule, owed a tithe as much. It is in the 
days of infancy and extreme youth that we are 
most open to feminine influence, so far as this 
influence is an intellectual and moral one. The 
character of the man is usually formed by the 
time that he marries, and, when the first flush 
of passion is over, he usually resents any at- 
tempt on the part of his spouse to reform him. 
He may listen to one of his own sex, but a 
154. 



SEX 

little contempt for the opinions of the other 
sex, he Is almost certain to feel. We know 
now that even In the animal world there is 
more sympathy between male and male than 
used to be thought, and our thanks are due to 
Prince Kropotkin for the emphasis which he 
has been able to place on mutual aid as a factor 
of evolution. And man has acquired more than 
one virtue from association with his own sex, 
for which he owes nothing to the other. Man 
learned to love his child before he learned to 
love his wife, it Is maintained in some quarters, 
and it is quite probable. Perhaps It was not 
his wife, but his infant, that first tamed barbar- 
ous man. 

Sex Is not so simple a problem as the 
Philistines have imagined It. It means more 
than the attraction of man for woman, or of 
woman for man ; more than this attraction must 
be considered in discussing the problem of sex. 
For there is also an attraction felt between in- 
dividuals of the same sex for each other, that 
is sexual In Its essence, or partly sexual, at any 
rate. Do these attractions find their roots in 
some obscure differentiation of the physiolog- 
ical factors? 

155 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

"Free surmise may sport and welcome, pleasures, 
pains, affect mankind. 

Just as they affect myself? Why, here's my neigh- 
bour color-blind. 

Eyes like mine to all appearance, green as grass do 
I affirm? 

Red as grass, he contradicts me; which employs the 
proper term?" 

I am indeed of the opinion that much which 
has been called homo-sexuality is not primarily 
sexual feeling at all, although, in holding this 
opinion, I may stand alone. A feeling which 
arises in the mind cannot be sexual, except in 
the general sense that all feelings, even such 
as hunger and thirst, are, in the last analysis, 
mental. And much which passes for homo- 
sexuality is mental, rather than physical, in its 
origin. The attraction of sex for sex is not, 
as we commonly employ terms, a mental 
phenomenon. It is a purely physical desire, 
and may exist, as is seen in the case of 
Schopenhauer, side by side with a distinct in- 
tellectual repugnance for the object of the 
passion. Sex attracts sex, not because the in- 
tellect desires it, but because the physiological 
factors are impetuous. Sexual passion is akin 
to chemical affinity. The physiology of the 
156 



SEX 

male possesses a burning desire, which can 
seemingly be gratified only through the 
physiology of the female — or at least, to its 
full extent, in the normal individual, and the 
same statement will apply to the physiology 
of the female, although much of the passion 
may be determined by the propinquity of the 
sexes. But abnormal individuals of both sexes 
may have no desire for the opposite sex, and 
yet possess an intense desire for an individual, 
or for many individuals, of their own sex. 
Other individuals are bi-sexual; that is, indi- 
viduals of their own sex and of the opposite 
sex alike attract them, and there is good reason 
for thinking that a larger number of bi-sexual- 
ists exist than was supposed a few years ago. 
The opinion has been expressed, and it is quite 
possibly a true opinion, that the germs of all 
sexual abnormalities exist in us all, but are 
held in check by inhibitions of various kinds 
in a majority of individuals. There have been 
anchorites who have crushed the normal desire, 
although at a heavy cost to themselves, and 
some of the Stoic philosophers adopted homo- 
sexual practices, because they fancied they were 
less sensual than the hetero-sexual practices. 
Or, rather, that is the explanation given. Per- 
157 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

haps the truth does not lie in this explanation. 
But I believe that homo-sexuality among the 
Greeks was largely, and in the main, indeed, 
an intellectual and spiritual, rather than a 
physical, craving. There is no evidence that 
the charms of women were overlooked among 
them ; there appears to have been no danger of 
race-suicide. But the Greeks were the most 
intense critics of life that the world has seen, 
and by an intellectual process they came to 
prize the Eternal Masculine as no other race, 
as a whole, has prized it. They came to feel 
that masculine beauty was the highest type of 
beauty, that friendship, or love between man 
and man, was the noblest of ideals; they ex- 
alted the prowess of the athlete, and the athleti- 
cism of the intellect, to the highest power; 
and, in the course of their criticism, they 
reached the conclusion that a love between man 
and man that culminated in desire for the most 
intimate physical contact was godlike, and de- 
serving of the warmest commendation. One 
learns from the speech of the inebriated Alci- 
biades, who unblushingly, as Plato reports his 
words, in The Banquet, confesses his love for 
Socrates, and relates a story of offered oppor- 
tunity for the gratification of physical passion, 
158 



SEX 

how strongly the new ideal of love had taken 
root among the Greeks. A passionate and 
romantic friendship, such as was common, if 
not universal, among the Athenians is capable 
of going to any length, and may, and probably 
will, simulate all the transports of sexuaHty, 
but the motive for the union will not be quite 
the same as that which draws individuals of 
the opposite sex together, because the one is 
rooted in the mind, while the other is rooted 
in the sense. This is the way, as I construe it, 
that the Greeks themselves regarded the matter. 
It is true that the masculine body was honored 
by them in a fashion which the modern spirit 
is not supposed to sanction, but even this honor 
had an intellectual basis, for it came from that 
intense love for beauty, that reverence for it, 
as might be said, which spared the life of more 
than one criminal of rare physical perfection, 
and which decreed that the criminal doomed 
to death should be executed in a way that did 
no violence to the miracle of the organized 
flesh. The relations of the Greeks, to which 
the term homo-sexual is applied, were sexual 
only in a secondary sense. The affection 
which brought the older and younger men to- 
gether sprang from no mere sexual impulse, 
159 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

but was the incarnation of an ideal which grev/ 
up on Greek soil as naturally as a flower. We 
may not be able to understand it to-day, but 
it will do us no harm to try. 

That i real homo-sexual impulse, an impulse, 
that is, of the senses only, is discoverable, how- 
ever, in many individuals is undeniable. There 
are other abnormalities even stranger that may 
be found. But I will pass them by. So far 
as all passions are concerned, they may be con- 
sidered from two points of view — the biological 
and the psychological. Biology sanctions only 
the hetero-sexual passion, for this is the only 
passion whose effect is to bring children into 
our world. But, when we clear our minds of 
cant, we are forced to confess that the child 
is little more than a by-product of the play 
of sex. Just as a person eats, not for the pur- 
pose of nourishing his tissues, but because the 
appetite is keen, and the palate tickled, so the 
play of sexual organisms is carried on because 
it is a form of sense enjoyment and a physio- 
logical necessity. It should be added that it is 
a psychological necessity also, and a psycholog- 
ical necessity outweighs all biological considera- 
tions. It will not do for the man or woman 
who indulge from necessity their hetero-sexual 
160 



SEX 

tastes to throw stones at the man or woman 
who indulge from necessity their homo-sexual 
tastes. One might as well stone a painter be- 
cause he is not a sculptor, or a sculptor because 
he is not a painter. All pleasure which one is 
impelled through physiological or psychological 
necessity to seek is legitimate if it does no vio- 
lence to the liberties and rights of others, and 
a society which has been capable of bearing up 
under the load of lewdness which has been seen 
in her brothels for thousands of years ought 
not to be greatly grieved over the acts of the 
homo-sexualists. No matter how bad some of 
these may appear to be, they can be no worse 
than much which has been, and is still, freely 
permitted. Those who have studied the matter 
with the>^reatest care, such as physicians and 
psychologists, are almost a unit in declaring 
that the beneficence or harmfulness of any given 
sexual act is not much different from the 
beneficence or harmfulness of another, when 
considered from a psychological, or physiologi- 
cal, standpoint. This point of view may not 
please the Philistines, and I daresay it will not, 
but it is time that we were done with Philistin- 
ism, and considered only facts and truths. The 
liberal mind will always be open to hear all 
161 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

that the doctors of all the sciences and the 
philosophies have to say. It will be impervious 
to none. What I have here written will doubt- 
less shock a great many people. I hope It will. 
There are many people who will need a fresh 
shock every day throughout eternity before they 
will be able to absorb an idea, and even then 
the Issue in some cases may be doubtful. One 
can discuss without dissent a great many pe- 
culiar facts, if one begins his dissertation with 
a sop to the Philistine, by speaking of this habit 
or that as disgusting. But such is not my 
method. I know nothing on earth quite so dis- 
gusting as a Philistine. 

I began this essay with a fling at the super- 
stition of sex. But I hope that I have shown 
all who have followed me thus far that I am 
not blind to the meaning of sex. I would say 
that sex Is like money. It Is good for what 
it will bring us. Money is only a medium of 
exchange. A dollar in Itself is of less worth 
than a pebble. But many lose sight of the real 
meaning of money, and become misers. The 
miser believes that money Is a good In itself. 
And so he lives by night and day, with no 
other thought in his mind than how much 
money he has accumulated. The golden days 
16g 



SEX 

go over him, and he does not see a thing. His 
eyes are blind to beauty, his ears are deaf to 
music, his soul never dreams of ascending the* 
dome of thought. He does not know the dif- 
ference between real joy and misery. Money 
has become for him the be-all and end-all, the 
alpha and omega, of existence. Every one 
who is not a miser pities one. But the miser 
is not one whit different in his essential essence 
from the man or woman to whom sex has be- 
come the all of being. The man who can see 
nothing but woman, the woman who can see 
nothing but man, is a miser of sex. Instead of 
perceiving that sex, like money, is only a medium 
of exchange, by which we obtain the goods of 
life that are desired, they believe that sex is 
the one thing to be desired. They make 
physiology king, just as the other kind of miser 
makes gold king. There are millions of men 
and women who believe that the essence of life 
is just an opportunity to gloat over sex, as 
the person who is money-mad believes that the 
essence of life is just an opportunity to gloat 
over moneys, real estate, and stocks and bonds. 
And both types of these mad worshippers are 
losing all the time the manifold riches which 
might be theirs. If it be said in reply that 
163 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

there are comparatively few who look upon 
sex as all, it is sufficient to retort that there 
are comparatively few who look upon money 
as all, but as there are millions who regard 
money as the main interest in life, so there are 
millions who regard sex as the main interest 
in life; and both of these beliefs are false be- 
liefs. By regarding sex as the main thing, 
just as by regarding money as the main thing, 
one's outlook upon life becomes so falsely 
colored that nothing is seen for what it really is. 
There are, speaking broadly, just three goods 
of life. One of these is knowledge, a second 
is aspiration, and the third is love. The mad 
sex-worshipper knows little of any of them. 
Knowledge and aspiration he is absolutely di- 
vorced from, and his love is lacking in breadth. 
He may be deeply immersed in affection for 
one individual, or even for a sex, but if all 
the boundless wealth of knowledge, of poetry, 
of music, of the deeper meanings of art and 
philosophy and friendship be not his, how much 
is really his? Very little, I should say. His 
life has become one of sensation merely, and is, 
moreover, but a harping on one string. To love 
a man is good, to love a woman is good, but to 
rest content in so narrow a groove is like losing 
164< 



SEX 

an ocean because one has been hypnotized by a 
drop of water. To love a sex means more 
than loving only one member of it, but when 
one gives up to sex what was meant for man- 
kind, and the universe, it is like living in some 
small town all of one's days, and dreaming 
that life elsewhere must be a tale of sordidness 
and woe. 

Perhaps some will assert that I am, after* 
all, only belaboring a bugaboo, that I am only 
knocking down a man of straw that I have 
myself set up. I wish that this were so. But 
the facts are quite to the contrary. The large- 
ness of life does not loom upon the horizon, 
and glow within the imagination, of our age as 
it has loomed and glowed in former ages. The 
literature of the age is getting thin. Friend- 
ship between man and man is becoming a 
poverty-stricken relationship. Men are losing 
faith in spiritual verities, because they cannot 
conceive the worth of ideals. They are not 
only beginning to doubt the immortality of 
their souls, but, worse yet, whether they have 
any souls that are deserving of immortality. 
Intellectual and moral bankruptcy stares us in 
the face. Men and women are seriously be- 
ginning to believe that we can live in the world 
165 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

without ideals at all. What a terrible delu- 
sion! 

And it is sex which many would substitute 
for the spiritual verities, for the old-time 
friendship between man and man, for ideals, 
for religious feeling, and the large conceptions 
of life. Our contemporary literature — as 
barren, for the most part, as a field of oaten 
stubble — reflects the sex-mania into which the 
age has fallen. The last works of the late 
George Meredith, the last works of fiction 
penned by Thomas Hardy — great men both, 
in many respects — and the works of innumera- 
ble European writers, and American scribblers, 
are sufficient proof of my contention. 

The stage can no longer endure Shakespeare; 
it wants a contemporary Feathertop of letters — 
and it gets him. Stage and sex begin with the 
same letter, and are coming to mean pretty 
much the same thing. The play has become a 
"show," like a circus-attraction, and it is re- 
garded as good business to advertise the 
"show" as one consisting of "mostly girls." 
Legs are now more popular than brains. Legs 
. — the whole degradation of our stage is summed 
up in that one word. Not that I have the 
slightest objection to legs, for I have none, not 
166 



SEX 

the slightest. I cheerfully acknowledge their 
aesthetic quality, and can look upon them with- 
out compunction, for there is little of the 
Puritan in my make-up, but I submit that when 
the aesthetic need of theatre-goers is fully met 
by attending an exhibition of legs the aesthetic 
need has sunk pretty low. And when I observe 
that literature with us has come to mean little 
more than fiction, and fiction little more than 
the play of sex, it seems to me time, and high 
time, that somebody spoke out in meeting. 
Publishers and stage-managers alike are de- 
termined that our fiction and plays shall be 
devoted mainly to matters pertaining to sex, 
and when they excuse themselves by pleading 
that sex is the only thing that interests a ma- 
jority of modern readers and theatre-goers, it 
is peradventure the truth that they are speak- 
ing. But oh, the pity of it! 

I do not know how long the present dis- 
graceful state of things is going to last, but 
I know that it cannot last forever. There will 
come a Ragnarok, a twilight of the gods. 
People will not always be willing to feed on 
literary husks. A hunger for a more nutritious 
intellectual pabulum will need to be appeased. 
People will tire of salacious plays that teach 
167 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

no genuine lesson, the salacious plays which are 
so packed with stupidities and inanities. The 
need of ideals, of friendship, of spiritual 
verities, will dawn within their souls, and the 
madness of sex-worship will pass away, when 
the spirit awakens, like a horrible nightmare, 
when the eyes open to the sunlight and the real 
world. 

Of course, we shall never lose our love of 
sex, and nobody but a mad ascetic could desire 
that we should. We shall merely get over the 
superstition of sex, the monstrous notion that 
a part can be greater than the whole. When 
lunacy overtakes large groups, it is apt to take 
a sexual form. It did so in the days of the 
French Revolution, when people began to say, 
"There is no God, death is an eternal sleep," 
and they carried the courtesan in honor to 
Notre Dame. When the French people got 
sane again, sex fell into its rightful place once 
more, and it is in its rightful place where we 
should desire to see sex installed to-day. 

And what is the rightful place of sex? This 
is not an easy question to answer. But I should 
say that so long as all the other interests and 
needs of life were fully sustained and realized, 
and we perceived that personality is the thing 
168 



SEX 

chiefly to be loved, that sex might have the 
rest of the field of consciousness to itself. How 
large that field would prove to be is another 
question, but it could not fail to cover a con- 
siderable tract of our human territory. We are 
sexual in our nature, and there is no more 
to be said for the ascetic view of existence than 
there is for the view that sex is all. The notion 
that has been advanced by a group of writers, 
that only by the impact of sex upon sex may 
the true, the beautiful and the good be known 
is a wretched sophism, for he who has been 
inspired by the great masters of the ages knows 
that no female influence, as such, was required 
to show him the path that leads to the Blessed 
Life. He did not consider curiously the sex of 
Plato or Aristotle or Kant or Carlyle or Emer- 
son or George Eliot. Sex, to perform its mis- 
sion, does not need to walk on stilts. It is be- 
cause it has learned to do so, that it begins 
to look a little ridiculous to one of clear vision. 
To attack sex as one of the joys of life would 
be foolish, and deservedly futile. It is only 
when sex gets in the way of life that it needs 
to be restrained. I am certain that sex is a 
sweetener of the cup of life, but one must not 
therefore infer that there can never be too 
169 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

much sweetening, for there can be, even to the 
point of danger from spiritual diabetes. There 
can be too much love, and too much love is al- 
most as harmful as hate. Evils are to a large 
extent goods imperfectly distributed. Some get 
too much; others do not get enough. Love is 
one of these goods which need to be more 
perfectly distributed, that they may have more 
diffusive power. 

A philosophy to be sound must square with 
life. Asceticism is an unsound philosophy be- 
cause it cannot be made to do so. It fails 
to realize that our instincts are the products of 
our organizations. It is true that these organ- 
izations may be defective, and sometimes are. 
Nature is not always kind, or trustworthy. 
The truth of this statement may be seen from 
a consideration of the male butterflies of the 
Bombyx species. These live for months as cat- 
erpillars, and sometimes for two years as chrys- 
alids, hibernating in a cocoon in some corner 
of the earth, or in the bark of trees. In due 
course of time, the butterfly, brilliantly col- 
ored, emerges from the cocoon, and spreads 
its wings, seeking with its long antennae to de- 
tect the odor of the female, which it is able to 
do for a long distance. The chase for the 
170 



SEX 

female is participated in by many competitors, 
and the flight is usually a long one. But each 
of these male butterflies, whose sole object 
in life, be it said, is to reach the female, and 
enjoy a love-triumph, is the victim of a sad 
defect, for its intestinal tract is only an abor- 
tion, and, for this reason, life cannot be long 
sustained. There is but one female to many 
males, and only one may enjoy her. Most of 
the competitors in the chase die of exhaustion 
before reaching the female, while the success- 
ful one enjoys his triumph but for a moment, 
and then is forced to bow to the dust. He has 
lived for sex alone, as have his brethren, and 
how tragic is the outcome! His life must go 
out, his bright colors must fade, almost at the 
moment of his birth. The male bee, too, dies 
after leaving his genitals in the body of the 
female, while there are spiders doomed to be 
eaten by the female as soon as they have dem- 
onstrated their masculinity. Thus are we 
taught how little permanence is possessed by 
an organization which yields only the instinct 
of passionate desire for sex. All Infra-human 
life, on its masculine side, is, indeed, little 
more than a physiological hunger of one va- 
riety or another. A hunger for food, a hunger 
171 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

for sex — this Is the historic life of nearly all 
animals below man. 

Man knows all the physiological hungers 
also, but the proof of his divine nature is seen 
in those spiritual senses that live in worlds un- 
realized. He is able to study his nature, and, 
in some measure, to understand it. He knows 
that sex is not a good in itself, but merely a 
means to the good. Life in all its breadth 
and meaning Is the only good. Biologically, 
sex exists for the purpose of producing prog- 
eny who shall carry on the work of their 
elders when these elders shall pass from 
the earthly scene. Psychologically, sex is a 
stimulant and fertilizer of life. Some one said 
of Herbert Spencer that he was not a man, 
but an intellect; nevertheless, if Herbert Spen- 
cer had never gratified the physiological hun- 
ger for food, or had never possessed it, those 
stout volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy 
would never have been written. And it is 
doubtless true also that much of the richnees 
which belongs to our Art and refined ways of 
living has come from the appeasement of sex- 
ual hunger. One can hardly be a poet, or an 
artist in any field of endeavor, if he starve his 
senses. One requires inspiration even to think. 

m 



SEX 

One must learn to love a part, before he can 
so much as dream of loving the whole. Sex 
is not all, as some misguided enthusiasts would 
have us believe, but the person who asserts 
that he or she has risen above sex is breath- 
ing in an atmosphere of lunacy through every 
pore. We do not become divine through for- 
saking the human ; we do not become gods and 
goddesses through a refusal to play here and 
now the parts of men and women. I know that 
there are wiseacres who affect to despise physi- 
ology, because they fancy that they have mas- 
tered psychology, but from what source, will 
they please tell us, did physiology come, if not 
out of the soul? Edmund Spenser was wiser 
when he wrote 

"For soul is fornix and doth the body make." 
Not by rejecting our bodies and despising our 
instincts shall we conquer Utopia, or gain the 
Kingdom of Heaven. Nirvana is not an ideal 
for one who wishes to be a master of life. 
Lack of desire is not a mastery of life; it is a 
negation of life. To be a live brute were bet- 
ter than to be a lifeless Buddha. The poor 
Bombyx butterfly, with no thought in his little 
nerve ganglia but to enjoy his female, and 
dying for lack of a proper intestinal tract, is 
173 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

more Inspiring than an epicene preaching epi- 
cene morality. The true philosopher will shun 
nothing except narrowness, and he will take 
all life for the province of his interest and 
love. 

If I have seemed at times to speak rather 
slightingly of sex, it is not because I have any 
sympathy with those who have sought to crush 
their sexual instinct, for I have none, but be- 
cause I would fain have men and women re- 
member that sex is not all, or even the main 
thing, of life. For, sooner or later, the great 
truth is brought home to us with irresistible 
force that the individual by himself is noth- 
ing, that the desires of the individual, unless 
they bear some relation to the welfare of the 
whole, are also nothing. The world must 
learn the meaning of Augustine's noble apos- 
trophe to God: "Thou hast made us for thy- 
self, and we are restless until we find rest 
in thee." There shall indeed be no rest for 
our weary hearts, until we shall have been bap- 
tized In the divine ocean of the ideal. And 
what is this divine ocean of the ideal, but Hu- 
manity, past, present and to come! Not In 
the love of one man for one woman, or of one 
woman for one man, or in the love of a few 
174 



SEX 

individuals for one another, is human nature 
whole; but in the vision of a Humanity in 
which every excellence is incarnated shall be 
found a love destined to bud and blossom in 
cosmic beauty. Whatsoever makes us strong 
with the strength of Humanity, and noble with 
the nobility of Humanity, is the Highest Good. 
To be a lover of the All is spiritual perfection. 
Our individual affections are of value to just 
the extent that they open up for us a pathway 
to the universal. To look into the eyes of a 
man and not to see anything beyond them, to 
look into the eyes of a woman and not to 
see anything beyond them, is to miss the les- 
son that we are on earth to learn. But when 
an individual becomes for us a lens, through 
which one may behold the immeasurable heav- 
ens break open to their highest, the real value 
of the individual has been discovered. I can- 
not indorse the ascetic ideal that holds the love 
of man for woman to be but a snare for the 
spirit. The great poetry of Dante alone is 
sufficient to refute so baseless a claim, and a 
thousand details of the common lot are suf- 
ficient also. Nor can I say that the passion 
which man has felt for man, now held to be 
lawless and forbidden, is of the Devil, rather 
175 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

than of God. There are words in the writings 
of Plato, the great poet-philosopher of Greece, 
and there is the wonderful civilization of 
Greece itself, to shatter the modern delusion. 
There is, indeed, but one test to be applied to 
all passion, by whatsoever name it may be 
called, or howsoever regarded, and that is the 
effect of the passion upon those individuals 
who experience its rapture. So far as any pas- 
sion narrows our regard for the great whole 
of living truth, beauty and goodness, it is evil; 
in so far as it enlarges our regard, it is good. 
History shows that passion of all kinds has 
done both, and so do the facts of daily experi- 
ence. In the last analysis, the good and evil 
of passion will be found to lie in the nature 
of the individuals themselves who are its in- 
carnation. 



176 



LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY 

'"p^HE past few years have witnessed the ex- 
tinction of more than one great Uterary 
light, and the passing of Swinburne and Mere- 
dith, of Bjornson and Tolstoy, has done more 
than to call attention to departed genius, and to 
the glory of an era that is no more. It has 
awakened, indeed, a melancholy conviction that 
literary genius is almost extinct. It is true that 
writers like Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. H. G. 
Weils, M. Maeterlinck and Herr Sudermann 
have their admirers, and even their disciples, 
but there is a feeling, nevertheless, in many 
quarters that the insight which these men pos- 
sess is an insight into nooks and crannies rather 
than an insight into life in its largeness and 
wholeness. 

Contemporary Literature is indeed ailing. 
The mantles of the dead literary giants have 
not fallen on the men and women who are now 
engaged in cultivating the literary gardens — 
not on many of them, at any rate. There are 
177 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

few books which come from the press with any 
promise of immortality. The average tome 
is cursed with incurable sterility. The hungry 
sheep of the reading public, who look to con- 
temporary writers for inspiration, are not fed. 
Verse that is thin, fiction that is still thinner, 
and plays that are absolutely inane, are the 
intellectual diet to which the age is becoming 
accustomed. To say nothing vital, to eschew 
distinction, to revel in mediocrity and common- 
place, is the fashion of the hour in the field of 
Literature. It may be that a majority of read- 
ers are satisfied with this drivel, there may be 
few who look for, or desire, anything better, 
but the lovers of real Literature, the men and 
women who believe that great books are rev- 
elations. Bibles, indeed, of the divine spirit in 
man, stand almost aghast at the intellectual 
paralysis which has crept over and struck down 
those who should be the masters of art. 

A truly great writer, whether of poetry or 
fiction, or whatsoever else may belong to the 
Literature of power, as distinguished from the 
Literature of knowledge, to use De Quincey's 
division, is always one who inspires us with 
a sense of the largeness of life, or with the 
greatness of his own personality. Sophocles 
178 



LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY 

takes us to the roof of the world, where we 
may survey the working of the moral laws that 
govern the individual in his relations to the 
World. Dante glimpses the deeps of Man's 
moral nature. Shakespeare fairly pelts the 
reader with the exuberance of his creative 
imagination. Goethe breathes the spirit of 
the highest human culture. Sir Walter Scott 
glows in the grandeur of noble conduct 
and great heroisms. Wordsworth penetrates 
far into the human soul, and discovers na- 
ture inscribed therein. Victor Hugo is on 
fire with a humane impulse. Dickens smites 
the chords of humor and pathos. Carlyle 
revels in the immensities and veracities of 
being. Emerson reports faithfully the vis- 
ions and meditations of his moods. Whitman 
sings his comradeship into our heart of hearts. 
In one way or another, each of these men has 
fulfilled some true and noble function of litera- 
ture and has taught us to know a great book 
when we read it. Have not serious and intelli- 
gent readers, then, a just grievance, if, in their 
reading of most contemporary writers, they 
fail to find the qualities that quicken the human 
pulse with the joy of vigorous and commanding 
hfe, or personality? It seems to me that they 
179 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

have. There are, it is true, no two men whose 
genius is quite the same, and if there were, one 
of them would be superfluous, but genius of 
some sort a writer must possess if his work 
would compel intelligent attention. And if a 
writer have not genius, and know not other- 
wise how to earn his bread than by writing bal- 
derdash, an enlightened society would gener- 
ously pension him as a reward for silence. 

Now if it be true, as it is, that contemporary 
Literature is ailing, if our writers do not in- 
spire and bring home to us the feeling that life 
is large and their own souls heroic, whose is 
the fault? Does it lie in the writers them- 
selves? Or in the public? Or in both? Or 
shall it be said that Hfe has diminished since 
the elder days of art, and that human person- 
alities have dwindled almost to the vanishing 
point? It is useless for critics to tell us that 
literary eras have always been succeeded by 
eras of literary sterility, for, even if this be 
true, it should not be accepted as an inevitable 
condition of humanity; rather should it be re- 
garded as a disgraceful fact of history that the 
intelligence of the race must overcome, unless 
we are to believe that geniuses are a fixed quan- 
tity, few in number, who condescend to visit 
180 



LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY 

the earth only during the propitious seasons. 
Such a theory might be satisfactory to the de- 
votees of certain esoteric philosophies and re- 
ligions, but it will not be accepted by persons 
who find only too much evidence that Genius is 
wasted every year and every day, as if it were 
of no more importance than the dead leaves 
of October which are hurled hither and thither 
by the roaring winds. The world is always 
full of young men who give promise of noble 
performance, yet, in the end, most ingloriously 
fail. Again, I ask, whose is the fault, if, in 
this present year, the last of nature's perennial 
miracles, there be among us little genius of 
achievement visible; nothing, indeed, for the 
most part, but a waste-plot of dull and com- 
monplace conventionalities, stupidly posing as 
men of letters? 

There can be, I think, but one answer to 
the question which will cover the larger num- 
ber of observed facts. Our answer must be 
that present day Democracy does not care for 
great Literature. When theatrical managers 
tell us that the production of Shakespeare's 
plays, or other classical pieces, means ruin to 
them; when publishers demand of an author 
that he write down to the level of plebeian and 
181 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

silly feminine taste; when the majesty of the 
law is invoked whenever a master dares to 
paint life as it is, or even as it ought, in his 
opinion, to be; we find the reasons, or some 
of the reasons, why our Literature is suffering 
from a dearth of distinction. Books to be 
published must be written to gratify the mob, 
and if the mob prefers, as it usually does, 
mediocre poems, mediocre novels, and even 
mediocre meditations on life, its preference will 
be respected by the whole bread-and-butter- 
brigade of Literature, because of that whimsi- 
cal notion of publishers which makes them pre- 
fer the gold of fools to the copper of the wise. 
The finer tastes must die of inanition, that the 
coarser tastes may have their surfeit. The 
mortifying truth is that our age is not favor- 
ably inclined toward genius, and loves not 
overmuch a virile personality in any sphere 
outside of business. Anything more vulgar 
and materialistic than our American Democ- 
racy it would be difficult to find. 

The modern world is committed to the prin- 
ciple of Democracy, but this fact should not 
blind us to the faults of Democracy. There 
never has been a Democracy in the history of 
the world that was very wise — not one. Greece 
182 



LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY 

may seem an exception, and Greece was indeed 
the wisest Democracy that the ages have 
known; yet even the wisest of democracies ban- 
ished Anaxagoras and Aristides, and con- 
demned Socrates to drink the hemlock. There 
may be in the womb of the future a Democracy 
that shall live in the spirit of a larger gospel 
than any gospel accepted in the past; such a 
Democracy may reverence all genius as soon as 
it is visible; but let us not anchor our faith 
to any past or present Democracy. It still re- 
mains true that we have the profane herd that 
Horace scorned. It is an eternal fact, as Car- 
lyle so strenuously insisted, that history is what 
great men have done. The Greece that cul- 
ture drowns is the Greece of the poets, the 
sculptors and the philosophic masters, the men 
who created the thoughts and ideals that paint 
the golden years of Literature and art. Henry 
James, the elder, indeed wrote that the only 
man recorded in history whom he should re- 
gard as a privilege to meet in the world beyond 
our bank and shoal of time, was the nameless 
personage whose sole distinction is that he 
voted to banish Aristides, because he was tired 
of hearing him called the just, a privilege that 
I hope has long since been granted; but loy- 
183 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

alty to truth compels me to assert that, not- 
withstanding the enthusiasm aroused in the 
breast of his American admirer, considerably 
more than two millenniums after his career was 
ended, by the unknown Greek whose vote 
helped to swell the total that drove Aristides 
the Just into exile, it was not such as this recal- 
citrant that made the Greece of history, the 
Greece of our artistic dreams and noblest de- 
spair. The Greek heroes of art, oratory, phil- 
osophy and statecraft still remain the Hellenic 
members of the "choir invisible," whose music 
has become a part of the gladness of the mod- 
ern world. 

Nevertheless, one must not forget that Dem- 
ocracy is here, and is here to stay. It is the 
central fact of our modern world. Democ- 
racy is become the arbiter of the world's des- 
tiny. In its favor is life. In its wrath is death. 
The literary man of to-day must please or in- 
spire this Democracy, or he will starve. And 
he deserves to starve, if he does not try to 
nobly please and inspire it, for that is the di- 
vine task he is called upon to perform in these 
early years of the twentieth century, the task 
that he will be called upon to perform in all 
the years that shall succeed the twentieth cen- 
184 



LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY 

tury. The people — even the worst of them — 
are his world. Hegel's doctrine of the unity 
of subject and object, and of their development 
pari passu, is an excellent one for the literary 
worker to recall. Without a world of objects, 
his mind would, like every other mind, be prac- 
tically, if not literally, nothing. It is true that 
a prosaic age has a very depressing effect upon 
an intelligence naturally poetic and creative. 
One fancies that Thomas Gray, and perhaps 
Robert Burns, would have sung greater songs 
if they had lived in a larger and more poetic 
environment. But it is the sublime privilege 
of the artist — his heaven-born gift — to find in- 
spiration in what often seems most unpromis- 
ing. He must see truth where no other man 
has seen it. He must see beauty where no other 
man has seen it. He must see goodness where 
no other man has seen it. In the world about 
him, with only such help as the life of the ages 
has added to his own unique vision, the poet 
must find his poem and the romancer his ro- 
mance. God help them if they fail, for failure 
to find poetry and romance in whatsoever age 
one may live is the spiritual death of the artist. 
I have apparently landed myself in one of 
those self-contradictions that are said to be 
185 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

characteristic of German philosophers, for I 
have admitted that all Democracy has slain, 
and continues to slay, genius, yet maintained 
that our writers must find their poems and ro- 
mances in the very Democracy which has been 
so cruel to them. But the contradiction is only 
apparent, not real, for it is the sublimest proof 
of genius that its eye can see within and beyond 
the obvious a spiritual meaning that the masses, 
for lack of genius, are unable to see. Every 
man, no matter how small he may appear to 
his contemporaries, or even to himself, looms 
large in the vision of a great poet, of one who 
perceives the real self and the mighty possi- 
bilities of him. The man who would immor- 
talise himself in this democratic age must see 
the larger self of even the most commonplace 
clodhopper. Of course, he will have no illu- 
sions concerning him. He will know, as every- 
body else knows, that the man is a clodhopper, 
but he will also know, what is not so evident, 
that the man is an avenue, leading backward 
indeed to the trackless waste of chaos, but lead- 
ing onward to no lesser grandeur than the in- 
visible City of God. It is the glory of Words- 
worth and Burns that they saw, what hardly 
any one else did see in their times, the poem in 
186 



LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY 

the simple dalesman and the cotter, the poem 
for which a man like Pope would never have 
ventured to look, and would never have found, 
even if he had cast his vision in their direction. 
It is often said as a jest at Walt Whitman's 
expense, that the common people whom he 
apotheosised spurned him and preferred the 
poets of more aristocratic temper, while sym- 
pathetic appreciation of his work came only 
from those to whom he was supposed in the 
morning of his career to be antipathetic. This 
is very true, but one must not therefore infer 
that Whitman's Democracy is an hallucination. 
Every great poet and seer is a martyr. He has 
always been nailed to a cross. But, even as 
the Hebrew poet expressed faith in his God, 
by saying, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust 
in him," so must the poet of to-day have faith 
in the ultimate goodness of Demos. He may 
be slain, he will certainly, if original, meet with 
flouts and jeers sufficient to terrify all except 
the hardiest, but if his faith endures to the 
end, he shall be saved from the literary Ge- 
henna, and, in the fulness of time, will find 
his place in the Pantheon of the Heart. 

This mighty Democracy, vulgar, brutal, and 
often vicious, harbors a modern sphinx, with 
187 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

a riddle to propound to every literary aspirant. 
The question of our sphinx is: "Have I a 
soul?" The everlasting literary welfare of 
the writer is determined by his answer. If he 
say that he does not know, or if he give the 
wrong answer, nothing can save him from the 
wrath of the Sphinx. Only he who sees that 
Democracy has a soul is safe, for the Sphinx 
of Democracy reads the spirit of the future, 
which the true priest of Literature will address. 
The question rightly answered will cause the 
sphinx of the question to slay herself as the 
Sphinx of old did, but the modern sphinx will 
die only to her vulgarity, brutality and vicious- 
ness. Otherwise she will remain very much 
alive, and with many new riddles demanding 
solution. Even in the welter of falsehood, 
ugliness, and all other diabolism that threatens 
at times to engulf whatsoever is true, pure, 
beautiful and of good report among us, one 
may find pearls and gems, if one but looks for 
them. As Emerson said, there is always some- 
thing singing in the very mud and scum of 
things. The spirit of sweetness and light is 
not found in him who never searches for 
values, save in the abysses of the past. Such 
an one may tinkle forth a profusion of rhymes, 
188 



LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY 

and fill a yard or two of space in public libra- 
ries, but the truth and beauty of life are not 
deeply ingrained within him, and his work will 
fade away as soon as men's minds are pierced 
by the first bright arrows of the new intellec- 
tual dawn. It is not easy to exaggerate the 
importance of antiquity, of those great masters 
who dwelt on the banks of the Ilissus and the 
Tiber, but the culture of the past is never truly 
reincarnated on these modern shores, save in 
men who rejoice to feel the breath of new 
mornings upon their cheeks. 

Our democratic society makes heavier de- 
mands upon the individual than were ever 
levied by the aristocratic societies of the past. 
The task of the literary worker of to-day, if 
he would fulfil his function worthily, is likewise 
harder. The writings of Goethe were only for 
the cultured few; Shakespeare had only a 
small class to please and inspire; Sophocles and 
iEschylus labored for a society so small that 
an Athenian theatre held it; but the writer of 
to-day must fascinate and inspire the teeming 
millions of the globe. The Greek heroes, the 
kings of Shakespeare, and the characters of 
Goethe must now find their place in the crowd; 
they must join the millions who have learned 
189 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

to speak, In some measure, the grand accents 
of liberty and equality, and reverently, yet 
boldly, proclaim the genius of the Galilean 
mount and lake their brother. 

The writer who would be true to the vital 
principles of Democracy will never flatter the 
vices and littlenesses of democratic society. If 
he does flatter vice and littleness, he will doubt- 
less receive his reward in the merry popping of 
champagne corks, in groaning festive boards 
and substantial cheques, together with such 
other favors as time has in store for those who 
seek only the gratifications of the passing hour, 
and to obtain them are willing to indulge in 
demagogic antics; but if he be a master, he 
will seek rather the rewards of the eternities, 
by speaking the truth and by singing the beauty 
of the substance that lies within and beyond 
the shadow. I know how hard, and even piti- 
less, it is to charge the poet and the romancer, 
or whatsoever kind of artist one may be, to 
follow implicitly and explicitly the light and 
leading of the idealistic gospel that illumines 
our pathway on the rugged steeps of life, yet 
reveals, in that illumination, how dry is the 
dust and jagged are the rocks over which he 
must pass, for if the physiology of Man be not 
190 



LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY 

real, it is, to use a philosophic distinction, at 
least actual; and the hungry and weary poets 
and tale-bearers, no less than the hewers of 
wood and drawers of water, require their bed 
and board. Nevertheless, the hero will not 
flinch. Society has usually starved the bodies 
of our poets, and she has also starved their 
souls, which was an even greater offence, yet, 
somehow or other, the poet, whether he have 
spoken through the medium of verse, or 
through the medium of prose, if once he have 
caught a vision of those towers of the intel- 
lect which reflect the radiance of the City of 
the Soul, whose beatitudes are tabernacled in 
the hearts of all truth-seekers and lovers of 
beauty, never averts his face from the fields 
consecrated and made elysian through his di- 
vinest dreaming, but, though beaten sore in 
body, and even with his life emaciated, it may 
be, from rough usage and society's sad misun- 
derstanding of him, goes to his work, or to his 
death, with a celestial fire burning in his heart, 
which all the bleak, desolate waters of Ma- 
terialism have no power to quench. There 
are, forsooth, two kinds of poets, and of art- 
ists in general. (All artists are poets, how- 
ever.) There is the poet who once caught a 
19X 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

radiant gleam of pure beauty, or beauty in 
truth and goodness, and was so charmed with 
his vision that he desired to inform the world 
of his miraculous fortune, but, when he found 
that the people did not listen, became con- 
vinced that his vision was only a mirage, and 
then, weary and heart-sick, drifted back into 
"the light of common day." This type of 
poet is the bud which the frosts of society 
kill, and how much of beauty and of inspiring 
worth the world has lost thereby can never 
be computed. But, fortunately, there is an- 
other, though almost infinitely rarer type of 
poet, who has seen too clearly and too deeply 
ever to forsake his vision, for the meaner things 
of a materialistic age. This kind of poet has 
toiled on, though, as history knows him, he 
has been poor, half-starved, rebuked, ostra- 
cised, or condemned, it may be, to the prison 
or the flames; yet glad of the privilege af- 
forded by life to voice what he has seen; and 
ready to go, if need be, swiftly to his grave, if 
the transcendent gift were still in his posses- 
sion. While such poets have been uncommon, 
they have been the salt of the earth, and only 
through them shall our Democracy learn its 
real nature, which is not a howling and irre- 
192 



LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY 

sponsible mob, but a society in which every 
man is potentially a king, a prophet, a priest, 
a poet. We have genius among us now, genius 
that we kill almost as soon as it begins to mani- 
fest itself; but when shall we witness again the 
genius whose vision the ignorance of society 
has no power to kill, the genius that shall re- 
deem us from our Intellectual weakness? 

One of the greatest needs of our Democ- 
racy Is a cultured class possessing high Ideals, 
that will, through its independence of financial 
storm and stress, be able to endow us with in- 
tellectual wealth and romantic beauty. Men 
like Goethe, Byron, Shelley, Browning and 
Hugo had private means that enabled them to 
do their work under favorable conditions. 
More than Is generally thought the world owes 
to high-minded men of leisure, who sang their 
songs and proclaimed their messages for the 
delectation of future generations, if not of 
their own time. Unfortunately for us in Amer- 
ica, those who should be our leisure class are 
still, for the most part, seduced by the siren 
voice that lures men on to seek greater material 
wealth. The millionaire must be a multi-mil- 
lionaire, and next a billionaire. If the seduc- 
tions of wealth fail to allure this or that man 
193 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

of wealth among us, it Is usually not poetic 
beauty or romance that he woos assiduously, 
but the sensualities. He does not worship 
Apollo, or cultivate the society of the Muses. 
His only divinity is Venus Pandemus. 

The failure of great Literature to appear at 
this juncture is due to the lowness of our gen- 
eral ideals. Neither the masses nor the classes 
have any Ideals worthy of the name; hence the 
Artist Is between the devil and the deep sea. 
Goethe said that all the great ages have been 
ages of faith. We live in a faithless age. 
Here and there a person whose intellect has 
been fed by the literary granaries of the past 
still holds to truth, beauty and romance, but 
he is like a man in the arctic zone endeavoring 
to keep from freezing by reading tales of the 
tropics. There is no confirmation of his 
psychic vision In the actualities his senses re- 
port. The evil of our age may be summed up 
In one word — materialism. Whether rich or 
poor, old or young, male or female, the aver- 
age person among us is a practical materialist. 
The creed of Haeckel may not be explicitly 
proclaimed, and it seldom is, but the common 
speech of men to-day betrays them, and reveals 
the hollowness of the faith that may be pub- 
194. 



LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY 

licly professed. Faith must come to us once 
more, faith not in money, but in great ideals, 
before the meadows of Literature shall again 
be spotted with flowers of gorgeous color. 

There is one great mystery of life to which 
science can find no solution, and which meta- 
physicians are apt to leave even darker. I 
refer to the paradox involved in human per- 
sonality. Whether we accept the orthodox 
theory of Monism, or the heterodox theory of 
Pluralism, as held, in one form or another, by 
Professor Howison, Mr. Schiller, Mr. Mc- 
Taggart, and the late Professor James, there 
still remain perplexities enough to puzzle 
us. The theory of idealistic Monism, if logic- 
ally developed to its ultimates, certainly de- 
stroys the freedom of the Individual, and, if 
individuals are not free, they are merely pup- 
pets. To say that they are fragments, or frag- 
mentary manifestations, of One Absolute Per- 
son, or Mind, does not help the matter any. 
The dignity of man requires, as Professor 
Howison has clearly pointed out, that Man 
shall have life in himself. And while the dif- 
ficulties of Pluralism are numerous, I am con- 
strained to believe that, upon the whole, they 
are less difficult than the difficulties of the op- 
195 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

posite theory. I cannot avoid the conviction 
that the uniqueness which we witness in every 
empirical ego is a part of metaphysical reality. 
Monism is a rational theory for those who 
believe in despotism, in the kingdom, or the 
empire; it is not a rational theory for those 
who believe in a democratic republic, which 
means, when carried to its logical ultimate, the 
supremacy of each individual over himself. 
No two men are alike; no two have quite the 
same vision of the world; and the more nearly 
men approach to the heights of genius, the 
more unique they are seen to be. No one ever 
mistook Swinburne for Mr. Watts-Dunton, or 
vice versa, although both were poets, critics, 
scholars, friends, and house-mates for many 
years. Hegel seems to be clearly right in his 
contention that a mind without a world is noth- 
ing, but no amount of philosophic scepticism, 
or metaphysical word-juggling, can sweep aside 
the stupendous fact of personality, paradoxical 
as the fact of personality is. The problem of 
personality is of vital importance to Democ- 
racy, and, indirectly, to Literature, and, for 
this reason, I am going to suggest what may 
be a partial, though not an entire, solution of 
the mystery. And this suggestion is that the 
196 



LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY 

world, which looks so solid and everywhere 
identical, may be, in reality, only a partial 
fusion of an infinitude of different points of 
view, each point of view being the uniqueness 
of a person, or individual mind. 

To present this philosophical theory ade- 
quately would require an essay. I merely refer 
to it here, because it seems to explain In part 
the necessity for Democracy. The conception 
of an Absolute doubtless has its value, but the 
Logic of Democracy demands that every man 
shall be his own Absolute, for the essence of 
Democracy is not balloting or securing majori- 
ties, but individual self-realization. It is use- 
less to maintain that any two individuals have 
the same vision of the world, for they do not. 
The sameness of their vision ends with sur- 
faces. The difference is found when they look 
beneath the surface, because each sees with the 
uniqueness of his own innerness. We must 
have a different monistic theory from the one 
usually presented, if the conception of Monism 
is to endure. Every vision of a poet, a 
prophet, or a philosopher, is an Ideal glimpse 
of the world, In which the personal equation 
is the decisive factor. Every great poet has 
felt In some degree, Indeed, the possibility of 
197 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

communism, and that the men and the women 
of his consciousness were a part of his larger 
self; that nature, indeed, was no solid wall, 
opaque to vision, but a community of friends; 
such also is my own belief, but there remains 
the private self still, and, in the uniqueness of 
each private self, I find a residuum eternally 
irreducible and impenetrable, which is not a 
part of nature's smiling face, but masks one of 
an infinite series of human unknowables, whose 
well-springs, hidden from the intellect, are the 
sources of the rivulets that make, by their con- 
fluence, the world-wide stream of real exist- 
ence. 

No two individuals are alike. But all indi- 
viduals may be complements in their common 
world. None other than Shakespeare could 
have written Hamlet; none other than Goethe, 
Faust; but after a Shakespeare or a Goethe 
has given his work to the World, the work 
becomes common property to all who have the 
wit to claim it. Their works will not have 
quite the same meaning to any two individuals, 
for the personal equation will operate here 
also, but there will be enough of the universal 
discovered to make them the joy of the world, 
and not merely individual possessions. All art 
198 



LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY 

Is communism. And so is Democracy, when 
once it is clearly comprehended by the free 
mind. 

Democracy is a confession of brotherhood. 
It means that individuals will use their private 
and unique gifts for the welfare of the whole. 
Knowing that he may complement every other 
man, the Democrat resolves that he will do so. 
But evil frowns upon us because social equi- 
librium cannot be secured, and the failure to 
secure social equilibrium comes from the fact 
that relationships are as unique as the selves 
that form them. Tennyson belongs to the race, 
but his relation to Arthur Hallam would not 
be, even in Utopia, quite the same thing that 
his relation to other individuals would be. To 
find our true relations to each and all is a 
problem that only Utopia can solve. 

Mysticism, both ancient and modern, has 
often done violence to our real nature, through 
its endeavor to find God in the individual soul 
alone, rather than in the Temple of Humanity. 
The mystic has been the victim of a sad con- 
fusion of thought. He has fancied that, by 
shutting his eyes to the many-colored world 
of time, the great white light of eternity would 
burst upon him with its august presence, and 
199 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

that, by turning a deaf ear to the manifold 
cadences of the human spirit, the voice of the 
infinite would be heard in his halls. A fatal 
delusion, for the infinite does not speak to the 
lonely, imprisoned self, and darkness, not 
light, always envelops him who refuses to see 
the beauty of the earth. From such sad and 
baleful mysticism. Democracy must ever avert 
its face. The grandeur of all must be seen by 
each; the grandeur of each must be seen by all. 
To-day life's music is full of dissonance; the 
larger visions are hidden by the dust raised in 
ephemeral toil; and the purple peaks of noble 
achievement are shunned by cowards who hug 
in fear their narrow vales. Our very democ- 
racy, as yet, is only a thing of shreds and 
patches; no Real Democracy glorified through 
faith and freedom, but only the make-believe 
of spread-eagle spouters and machine politi- 
cians. No wonder that Literature halts. It is 
not strange that the sun-kissed hills of romance 
appear to have dissolved into myths and fables. 
A person must feel the heart-beat of the uni- 
verse to be a poet. Only men of faith in ideals 
can transform the intellectual desert of the 
world into the gardens of romantic hope and 
expectation. We still await the avatars of 
200 



LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY 

truth and beauty, who shall realize for us Dem- 
ocracy and art, and shall, by so doing, scatter 
the seeds of a new gladness throughout the 
world. 



201 



THE SUPERSTITION OF HEREDITY 

"j\yrUCH has been spoken and written during 
the past century and a half concerning 
the superstitions of religion, and the evil of 
theological dogmatism, and there has been 
much ground for complaint in these matters. 
But it is a question whether the superstitions 
and dogmatisms of science are not likely to be- 
come equally intolerable. If the dogmatists of 
science should ever get a grip upon our lives 
equal to the one which priests have possessed 
in the past, the joy of life will be in as immi- 
nent danger of being throttled, as it was actu- 
ally throttled by the priests of the Church, and 
without those assurances of a blissful future 
which the theologians never failed to give to all 
who heeded their admonitions. 

One of the great modern superstitions of 
science is the dogma of Heredity. Of course, 
there is much truth in the dogma. There is 
truth in all dogmas. The truth of Heredity Is 
found in the fact that figs produce figs, and 
202 



THE SUPERSTITION OF HEREDITY 

thistles produce thistles ; that rattlesnakes breed 
rattlesnakes, and human beings breed human 
beings. But when we are told by doctrinaires 
that human beings can be bred like cattle, 
sheep, swine and dogs into superior forms of 
their type, if we will but follow the teachings 
of the Eugenists, it is time to call a halt, and 
demand the proof. For, while an animal is a 
creature of heredity, every individual human 
being is very largely a variation from all that 
has gone before. There is an uniqueness about 
every man. And so when one reads the writ- 
ings of Eugenists, like Karl Pearson and the 
late Sir Francis Galton, one grows sceptical 
of the things they say, when this fact of unique- 
ness is borne in mind. These men dream of a 
race to be produced consciously, which shall 
be as kind as St. Francis, a race that will draw 
in at every breath the quickening ozone of phil- 
anthropy, with great intellectual gifts; a race 
of Bacons, Shakespeares and Goethes, indeed, 
with literary masterpieces dropping from in- 
numerable pens, like ripe red apples from the 
trees in autumn, a race from which every sor- 
did impulse shall be extirpated, and every gen- 
erous impulse conserved, and all of these de- 
siderata are to be accomplished by merely 
203 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

mating the right men with the right women. 
Folly shall die, and wisdom shall dwell as an 
immortal with us. It is, indeed, when super- 
ficially viewed, a very pretty dream. 

There is, however, one supreme objection 
to be urged in opposition to this theory, an 
objection that is found to be lying at the very 
threshold of the discussion. For investigation 
does not reveal any superiority on the part of 
the Eugenist's children to the children of those 
who have never considered eugenic principles, 
or even heard of them. One has a right to 
assume that the estimable gentlemen who ad- 
vocate the new theories of breeding have en- 
deavored to put into practice their own pre- 
cepts. But, if they have done so, what have 
they to show for it? Where are the wonderful 
children bred on eugenic principles? If they 
have married the right women, and thus ap- 
plied the laws of breeding known to every dog 
and pigeon fancier, where are the prodigies of 
intellect and beneficence which we are led to 
expect, on the basis of eugenic teachings, from 
such well-assorted unions? Are we to be in- 
formed that precept and practice have not, in 
their cases, been walking hand in hand, and 
that their divergence is responsible for the lack 
204. 



THE SUPERSTITION OF HEREDITY 

of SO much Intellectual light and philanthropic 
heat as might have been confidently predicted 
to appear, if the Eugenists had possessed the 
faith that makes faithful? If, indeed, there 
has been such a divorce between act and pre- 
cept on the part of the eugenic masters, one 
can but express regret that the masters of 
eugenic words have neglected their opportunity 
to butter the human parsnips of their romantic 
gardens for the world's intellectual and moral 
mart. There is something pitiful when a man 
who has carried the heats of youth far into the 
winter of his age becomes a preacher of asceti- 
cism at last, just after the soil of his being has 
frozen solid, and the last flower of his summer 
is faded and gone. Nor is it less pitiful to 
view a scientific prophet yelling like mad for a 
race of supermen, if in the blissful days of 
youth, when Love claimed him for his own, he 
did nothing to produce so much as one super- 
man. 

We are all, no doubt, very miserable sinners. 
But there may be some excuse for the failure 
of the Eugenists to turn out Shakespeares and 
John Howards. That failure may lie in the 
fact that their theory of heredity is a myth. 
As was remarked above, one cannot say that 
^05 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

the theory of heredity is altogether false, since 
like gives birth to like. We all know that ape 
gives birth to ape, and human to human. But 
there was once upon a time an ape, or some- 
thing that looked and acted very much like 
one, unless Darwin and Haeckel be ostracised 
from the courts of Science, who succeeded in 
producing a being who must have appeared to 
him as a super-ape, to whom the name of man 
has since been given. The poor father and 
mother apes possessed no self-consciousness, 
but their child brought into the world this won- 
derful attribute, and his descendants grew so 
proud of the gift that they learned to despise 
their far-away infra-human ancestor, and, in- 
deed, the whole line of their ancestors who 
were even lower in the scale of being than the 
poor ape had been, and not only did they learn 
to despise their anthropoid and other ances- 
tors, but for millenniums they were so con- 
ceited with their powers that they learned first 
to deny, and then to forget, the truth concern- 
ing their ancestry, until Lord Monboddo, Dar- 
win, Huxley, and a few other men of veracity 
and daring courage, laid the facts bare, and 
blabbed them far and wide. But, in doing so, 
they revealed, though perhaps unconsciously 
206 



THE SUPERSTITION OF HEREDITY 

to themselves, a weapon that may yet give the 
death-blow to much that passes to-day as the 
coin-current of truth in the matter of Heredity. 
There was, of course, some indication of 
Heredity in the super-ape. Anatomically, the 
Heredity-element is manifest even yet. Phys- 
ically, Heredity is a fact. Nobody will dispute 
that. But the point to be brought home is that 
the anatomical likenesses between man and the 
ape do not mean very much to the student of 
anthropology. All human beings bear some 
resemblance to one another, yet all human be- 
ings are the possessors of individual unique- 
ness which differentiates them in principle from 
the entire animal creation. If you know all the 
characteristics of one rattlesnake, you know the 
characteristics of all rattlesnakes. If you know 
all the characteristics of one lion, you know 
all there is to know about lions in general. If 
you know one ape thoroughly, you are prop- 
erly introduced to all apes. But you may study 
one man carefully for twenty years, and be no 
better acquainted with the next man whom you 
may meet. One may know the progeny of an 
animal by studying the elder animal, but the 
most intimate knowledge of a human father 
or mother will give no clue to their children. 
207 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

Why there should be this difference between 
the animal and man is one of life's mysteries, 
but it is a fact that our eugenic friends, and 
many other doctrinaires, would do well to con- 
sider carefully. They might not then be so 
cocksure about the hereditary dogmas. And 
they might in time come to believe that every 
individual is the master of his fate, the cap- 
tain of his soul; that neither the stars 
above us, nor the ancestors behind us, have 
power to keep a human footstep from pressing 
forward. 

Weismannism stripped the elder theories of 
heredity of half their strength, and there may 
be further strippings to come. The popular 
notion of heredity makes of one's parentage 
a pair of creators, and this notion is bound to 
disappear when closely scrutinized and care- 
fully analysed. No creator can create anything 
greater than himself. A pair of creators can 
create nothing greater than themselves. If two 
writers collaborate in the writing of a book, 
the strength and weakness of the two writers 
will appear in the production. And so, while 
it is true that human bodies, like animal bodies, 
are composites, possessing the strength or 
weakness inherited from the parents, or even 
^08 



THE SUPERSTITION OF HEREDITY 

more remote ancestors, it is not logical to as- 
sume that mental and moral characteristics 
which are present in the child, but not in the 
parents, are in any way the product of the mind 
or soul of the parents. It is the principle of 
variation that makes one an individual, and 
variation has never yet been scientifically ex- 
plained. Probably it never will be. But it is 
variation, rather than heredity, which makes 
an individual in .resting to us, and worthy of 
study. The belief in the inheritance of the in- 
tellect is a sad delusion. If one possess an 
idea of which neither his father nor mother, 
nor yet any of his remote ancestors, ever 
dreamed, from what stream of blood could it 
have been inherited? The trouble with many 
of our scientific savants is that they abhor mys- 
teries, and desire to find a key that will unlock 
the chamber of every earthly secret. Many 
have hoped to find in heredity a key. But 
variation is the real secret which needs to be re- 
vealed, not heredity, if we are to understand 
the individual, and no key has yet been found 
to explain it. 

It has been said by Edmund Montgomery 
that "every philosophical question rightly 
stated is a physiological question." But surely 
209 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

such a proposition is not susceptible of proof. 
Physiology might account for Shakespeare, if 
one knew enough physiology, but, even if that 
were true, it would still be necessary to ac- 
count for the physiology that explained him, 
and, as conditions now stand, there is no physi- 
ologist who can from his most minute knowl- 
edge of an individual's physiology, state what 
the ideals, moral characteristics, and intellec- 
tual abilities of an individual are. A post 
mortem gives no key to a human soul. Phren- 
ologists made great pretensions a generation 
or two ago, but the name of Gall does not 
stand high to-day in the halls of science. The 
men of genius did not always have good heads, 
and fools sometimes looked as if they were 
men of genius. A certain kind of brain may 
belong to genius, but it would be fatuous to 
say, in the present state of our knowledge, 
that the brain determines genius. It is quite 
as likely that genius determines the kind of 
brain. Sluggish blood, they say, makes slug- 
gish wits. It may be so. But who knows if it 
be not the other way about? Perhaps sluggish 
wits make for torpor in the arterial current. 
Too much has been written of physiology as 
a cause; the future may witness a school of 
210 



THE SUPERSTITION OF HEREDITY 

savants who will treat of physiology as an 
effect. 

The principle of variation represents some- 
thing more than a difference of degree; it is 
a difference of kind. Every man of genius is 
a variation from his ancestors in kind. Strong 
believers in Heredity have often striven to 
minimise this principle, but without success. 
Mr. Havelock Ellis, for example, after admit- 
ting that none of Carlyle's ancestors ever 
showed any capacity for authorship, says that 
Carlyle wrote just as they would have written, 
if they had been able to write. But how did 
Mr. Ellis make this truly astounding discov- 
ery? How, indeed, is it possible to know that 
a person who never has done a given thing 
would do a given thing in a certain way if he 
did it? Mr. Ellis wants us to believe that Car- 
lyle was only the voice of myriads of silent 
generations of ancestors. Well, it is best to 
be frank, and so I will say frankly, with all 
due respect to Mr. EUis, a psychological in- 
vestigator who has done some splendid work, 
that neither he nor any other man who indulges 
in this sort of generalization knows what he is 
talking about. He is only nourishing a crude 
theory, and indulging in the rashest kind of 
211 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

Speculation. One must know persons before 
one can speak with due assurance concerning 
them, and Mr. Ellis has never let it be known 
that he was ever on even speaking terms with 
any of Carlyle's ancestors. It might have oc- 
curred to him, one might have supposed, that a 
man who was the son and grandson of peasants, 
and yet was able to use more words than any 
other British author, save one, presents in him- 
self a rather startling phenomenon, for, as is 
generally known, a few words are sufficient to 
express all the ideas, ideals and desires of a 
peasantry. The genius of Carlyle for using 
words is in itself sufficient proof that his varia- 
tion from his ancestry was not one of degree 
merely, but one of kind. Like all men of 
genius, Carlyle is an unexplained mystery, and 
Mr. Ellis has not lifted enough of the curtain 
that conceals the mystery to let in a single ray 
of light. 

The common notion of Heredity would, if 
accepted, destroy the concept of personality. 
If a person is only a creation of something, 
then, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as 
a person. A man created or manufactured by 
his ancestors would be an individual no more 
than Feathertop, in Hawthorne's story, was 
212 



THE SUPERSTITION OF HEREDITY 

an individual. It is the principle of variation 
which confers personality, or individuality, 
upon every human being. And variation is not 
due to heredity, for it is the antithesis of 
heredity; it cannot be created, because it is 
unique. I wonder if even Mr. Ellis himself, 
who sees in Carlyle only the voice of silent 
peasants, who, if they had written at all, would 
have written just as he did, could find the au- 
dacity to apply the same principle to the aerial 
genius of Shelley. For nothing is more certain 
than the fact that the poet, whom Matthew 
Arnold called "a beautiful and ineffectual 
angel beating in the void his luminous wings 
in vain," was as different from his ancestors, 
both paternal and maternal, as he would have 
been if he had been born into another family. 
His unworldliness, his conception of universal 
love, his passion for reforming the world, his 
contempt for convention, as well as his sky- 
piercing music, were as foreign to all the other 
Shelleys, and to the women who married them, 
as day is to night. From whence, then, did 
Shelley inherit those characteristics that make 
him the Shelley of our knowledge? If the 
answer must be, as, indeed, it must, from no- 
body, then the silliness of the popular notion 
213 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

of heredity ought to be self-evident in this case 
at least. 

That which is true in the case of Carlyle 
and Shelley is really true of all individuals. 
Everybody is really himself, and nobody else; 
an individual is always unique. He is not a 
continuation of his father, or his mother, or 
of the two combined. The uniqueness of each 
individual is the great compelling fact of each 
individual, when the individual is analysed to 
the bottom. He may resemble his father here, 
or his mother there, in one or another aspect 
of his being, but then all human beings resem- 
ble one another. That is the penalty, or the 
reward, of their being human. It is true 
that Oscar Wilde was able to say, with some 
degree of validity, in De Profundts, "Most 
people are other people. Their thoughts are 
some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, 
their passions a quotation." But it is not the 
influence of Heredity, but the influence of en- 
vironment, of which Wilde is speaking. And 
there is, it must be confessed, a peculiar chame- 
leon-like quality in most persons which is mani- 
fested in whatsoever environment they are 
placed. When they are in Rome they do as 
the Romans do. But this quality has nothing 

214! 



THE SUPERSTITION OF HEREDITY 

to do with heredity, and it Is environment 
which is really responsible for most of the phe- 
nomena attributed to Heredity. To conform 
is easier for most people than not to conform. 
Yet even in conformity the uniqueness of each 
person's nature will be found cropping out. 

How influential environment is may be seen 
in the fact of physiognomy. For example, con- 
sider the case of the Jews. The Jews have 
preserved the purity of their race to a remark- 
able degree. Very few of them marry outside 
of their race, yet one may observe that while 
the racial physiognomy has been preserved 
throughout the generations, the Jew who is 
born in France bears some facial resemblance 
to a Frenchman, while a German, or Russian, 
or Polish Jew will carry the physiognomical 
marks of their respective countries with them. 
It does not take long for the descendants of 
European immigrants to approximate to the 
American type, even when there has been no 
intermarriage with the native stock. These 
facts alone indicate, or seem to indicate, that 
much which we commonly attribute to Hered- 
ity ought to be attributed not to Heredity, but 
to environment. Would Hegel among the Hot- 
tentots have been one of the world's greatest 
215 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

philosophers ? At best he would probably have 
been nothing more than a superior Hottentot, 
and he might even have been an inferior one. 
If the popular notions of Heredity be ac- 
cepted, an individual must be regarded as 
nothing more than the confluence of two 
streams. His largeness, his superiority to 
either of his parents, is nothing more than the 
union of the parents, or of two streams of 
tendency, in the child. The genius of the indi- 
vidual will be only the sum total of the smaller 
individual geniuses of his ancestors. If he be a 
great poet, his poetic greatness must be re- 
garded as only the accumulated inheritance of 
all past poetic impulses in the ancestral line. 
Superstition, even scientific superstition, as we 
may call it, dies hard, but surely we know 
enough to make incredible this fiction of 
intellectual Heredity. The notion that a man 
is created by his parents is the most myth- 
ical of all myths. A person is never created. 
He is born into the world, and he grows; that 
is all. One can never create anything greater 
than himself, and to assert that the myriad- 
minded Shakespeare was the creation of two 
commonplace persons of Stratford-on-Avon is 
to make oneself ridiculous. Even the most 
216 



THE SUPERSTITION OF HEREDITY 

obtuse clodhopper is himself, and not another, 
or a combination of others. His ideas, such as 
they are, are his own; his memory is his own; 
his experience is his own; his entire individ- 
uality is his own. He looks at the world from 
his own angle.; his own eyes and ears must do 
service for him. The physiological genesis of 
a person is from his parents, but between a 
person's physiological genesis and his logical 
genesis is a gulf which no mechanical philosophy 
has ever been able, or ever will be able, to 
bridge. The children of the mediocre have 
risen to the heights of genius; the children of 
geniuses are seldom distinguished for genius 
themselves. 

The tendency of genius to physical sterility 
has often been commented upon. But in those 
instances where genius has left children behind, 
and, after all, there are many such instances, 
nothing but discouragement is found by those 
who lay stress on the principle of heredity. 
When the great Greek writers and artists died, 
their genius perished with them; they did not 
bequeath it to their children. And In the very 
fall of Greece from the proud position which 
it once held, in the very degeneracy of later 
generations, is found proof that heredity Is not 
217 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

a very meaningful term in the affairs of the in- 
tellect. If heredity be a powerful factor in 
the building of genius, why did the glory that 
was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome, 
pass away? Why did culture wither at the 
breath of the barbarian? Everyone knows 
that the fall of Greece and Rome was due to 
the decay of Greek and Roman manhood, but 
if the greatness of a man is transmitted, there 
should have been no decay in the intellec- 
tual and moral fibre of these once dominant 
races. 

Even those cases which the sticklers for the 
Heredity principle are fond of citing, as 
though they illustrated or proved their theo- 
ries, will not bear close inspection. One hears 
it said that William Pitt inherited his states- 
man-like qualities from his father, Lord 
Chatham. Well, Lord Chatham and his son 
were both great statesmen, but a study of their 
respective personalities will reveal that there 
was as much difference between the two men as 
there was between Gladstone and Disraeli. 
No biographical critic could make a criticism 
of the one do service for the other. Edward 
Everett, and his son William Everett, were 
both great orators, but it is safe to say that 
218 



THE SUPERSTITION OF HEREDITY 

nobody ever mistook an oration of the one for 
an oration of the other. It would be almost 
as easy to confound the oratorical efforts of 
Webster and Clay ! 

Let us be honest ! Life is just as mysterious 
to-day as it was two thousand or more years 
ago. Science has thrown a little light here and 
there, upon this spot and upon that, but we 
are no nearer to knowing ultimates than the 
mediaevalists or the ancients were. It would 
require an Absolute Being to really explain the 
things which we seek to explain, or have ex- 
plained for us, by mechanical laws. Mechan- 
ical laws explain nothing but mechanics. And 
man is infinitely more than a piece of mechan- 
ism. When a Cervantes, or a Shakespeare, or 
a Walt Whitman, or an Abraham Lincoln ap- 
pears, we try to account for him in this way, or 
in that way, but in reality there is no account- 
ing for him. One may take the genealogies of 
Whitman and Lincoln, and trace, with some 
degree of probability, their respective ancestral 
lines a considerable distance back, but the most 
minute study of their ancestral trees will fail 
to reveal so much as an inkling of evidence that 
the ancestry of one was conspiring to produce 
a great poet, and the ancestry of the other a 
ai9 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

great statesman. The uniqueness of each of 
them stands out like a snow-crowned summit 
rising from an almost level plain. One may 
even doubt whether the present is in the slight- 
est degree the product of past hereditary men- 
tal influences. The genius and talent of the 
past have left their works behind, and we have 
entered into the inheritance of their labors. 
But our inheritance is of the visible, not the 
invisible, things. We know nothing of the 
nerves and brains of the past; we know only 
that the Pyramids and the Sphinx, Greek tem- 
ple and Gothic cathedral, the Iliad of Homer, 
the Antigone of Sophocles, the Don Quixote 
of Cervantes, the Hamlet of Shakespeare, the 
Leaves of Grass of Whitman, and all the other 
masterpieces of art and literature burst into 
being, because within the past there were heroic 
masters of art and letters. Whence these 
heroic masters came, and whither they went, 
after they departed from these shores, no mor- 
tal knoweth. We can only guess, or lose our- 
selves in the fogbanks of metaphysical specula- 
tion — that is all. To bow our heads in rever- 
ence before the gigantic mystery of life were, 
perhaps, the wisest thing for us to do. 

Yet speculate we shall and must, for it is 
220 



THE SUPERSTITION OF HEREDITY 

our nature to dwell upon this mystery. We 
ourselves are that mystery. And there will 
be no harm in such speculation, so long as we 
cling closely to noble theories. But the popu- 
lar notion of Heredity is ignoble, because it 
destroys the meaning of personality, and the 
value of individuality. Perhaps we may have 
a right to conceive of all selves as divine be- 
ings, existing from everlasting to everlasting, 
learning slowly from experience the meaning 
of themselves, and of their relations to each 
other; learning, indeed, among other things, 
that, while each one of them is unique, only 
through mutual sympathy and cooperation may 
that uniqueness shine throughout the universe 
as a beacon. What is Reality? — that is the 
question which the philosophers have been ask- 
ing throughout the centuries. Well, Reality 
may be just a system of thought-relations, ex- 
istent through the mutual attractions and affec- 
tions (and perhaps some darker qualities) of 
a Society of Eternal Persons. Perhaps our 
common human nature may have been won by 
us only after many long and weary struggles 
with gigantic cosmic forces somewhere back in 
the sons of time ; perhaps the world in which 
we live was originally only a happy thought, 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 



which the Eternal Persons have made actual; 
and our life, with all its struggles, is a process 
of redemption, through which a loftier sphere 
of vision is gradually being achieved. 



THE LONELINESS OF LIFE 

"\yrAN has been defined by Aristotle as a 
social animal, and a social animal Man 
unquestionably Is. But one cannot live for half 
a lifetime, If he have discerning eyes, without 
perceiving that a goodly percentage of man- 
kind derive very little happiness from the soci- 
ety Into which they were born, or have betaken 
themselves, and that their lack of happiness is 
due to a feeling of loneliness. Those whom 
they meet are not congenial or inspiring- 
There Is for them no love or friendship which 
endures; little Indeed that gives even tempo- 
rary satisfaction. 

We should all be surprised, I believe, If we 
were to listen to the weary tales of Loneliness 
which most persons of refinement and sensitive 
nature could tell, and doubtless would, If a 
feeling of pride did not restrain their lips. 
Individuals are not well-adjusted to one an- 
other. There is little sympathy between them 
in the deeper matters of their lives. It is easy 
223 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

to sympathize with the hungry and homeless 
stranger; but to sympathize with the intellec- 
tual, ethical, and aesthetic needs of our fellows 
is very difficult, and to a majority of persons, 
as yet, all but impossible. The daily press 
reports the cases of men and women who have 
starved for lack of bread, but nobody has ever 
thought of reporting the far more numerous 
cases of those who have starved for lack of 
poetry, of philosophy, of friendship, or some 
other necessity of the soul. To how few can 
one reveal frankly, and without timidity, all 
the thoughts and feelings that have been born 
out of one's experience! Man is still afraid 
of Man; quite as afraid of him, indeed, as he 
is of a wild beast. It is a dear price which we 
pay for our individuality. 

There are persons who regard self-suf- 
ficiency as the highest human ideal. But we 
live in a world in which no individual is, or 
can be, self-sufficient, and the course of evolu- 
tion, instead of endowing us with an ever 
greater degree of self-sufficiency, is stripping 
us of the httle which the individual formerly 
possessed. There are few wants which one 
can supply for himself, and most of our time 
is spent in supplying the wants of others. It 



THE LONELINESS OF LIFE 

is only the artist who finds a pure satisfaction 
in his daily task, and even an artist would 
starve, intellectually and aesthetically, if he 
were completely dependent upon himself for 
inspiration. It is one of the paradoxes of life 
that every individual is unique, and yet it is 
this uniqueness of others which we truly prize, 
(as well as hate), rather than those qualities 
which are common to human nature. It is not 
the likeness of another to oneself which makes 
him interesting, but his difference, and yet in 
that difference all our difficulties in the way of 
rapprochement are found. The difference at- 
tracts us, as the light attracts the moth, and 
not infrequently with the same fatal result. 

One might suppose that the great man would 
possess a greater degree of self-sufficiency than 
his lesser brother, but the precise opposite is 
the fact. It is the genius who suffers most 
from the loneliness of life. Those who are des- 
titute of genius or talent often find life very 
much to their satisfaction, upon the whole. 
They make no heavy demands upon their com- 
panions, and their companions make no heavy 
demands upon them. The small amount of 
give and take required is given and taken. 
They indulge In their innocent pleasures, or 
2^5 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

their dissipations not so innocent, but both are 
comparatively simple, and yield a sufficient de- 
gree of satisfaction to enable the time to pass 
pleasantly. Sorrow comes to them, of course, 
as it comes to the more gifted, but it seldom 
brings heartbreak with the tears. The meas- 
ure of their days is passed with none of those 
violent convulsions of spirit, moods of utter 
despair, austere questionings of the universe, 
and the long black stretches of loneliness, 
which make life seem a veritable nightmare to 
many a child of genius. When the widow of 
the poet Shelley said that she intended to send 
her son to a school, not where he would learn 
to think for himself, but where he would learn 
to think like other people, she expressed the 
tragedy of genius, as she had seen It exempli- 
fied in her husband's career. The genius can- 
not think like other people, he cannot feel like 
other people; but we slay him because he can- 
not. The expansive mind and heart alike have 
sorrows that the syncopated organs of thought 
and feeling know little or nothing of. 

The secret of happiness lies in the possession 
of power to realize oneself. But self-realiza- 
tion does not mean the same thing to all per- 
sons. Perhaps the pugilist, or athlete, who 
226 



THE LONELINESS OF LIFE 

becomes a champion in his sphere, possesses a 
degree of self-realization vouchsafed to very 
few, but to one who cares nothing for pugilism 
or athletic sport such success will seem no re- 
alization of the self at all. Perhaps a majority 
are fairly well-satisfied if they obtain enough 
material reward from their toil to support 
themselves and their families in a moderate 
degree of comfort. To be able to eat three 
substantial meals a day, to be able to provide 
for one's beer-thirst and tobacco-craving, and 
a pillow for the weary head at night, is quite 
enough to fill thousands with a spirit of sweet 
content. But it is not with these that I am con- 
cerned in this paper. 

I am concerned here only with those Indi- 
viduals whose demands upon life are so great 
that they fail to find the happiness which all 
crave; the individuals who know only too well 
that they possess fancies, feelings and ideals 
to which no human satisfaction is ever likely to 
be vouchsafed; the individuals who know the 
loneliness that turns the world for them Into 
a desert; the poet with his song, the painter 
with his picture, the composer with his sym- 
phony, the philosopher with his treatise, the 
dreamer still struggling with the attempt to 
«27 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

give his vision embodiment, the youth swept 
in a maelstrom of conflicting emotions, to 
whom ideal and failure have become synony- 
mous words in the lexicon of experience. The 
failures of life are really more interesting than 
the successful, for the successful are usually 
mediocre in the deep facts of experience, see- 
ing clearly enough, and with amazing sharp- 
ness, perhaps, into some nook or corner, but 
blind to the larger spaces, while the failures 
are often those who have stood fast by the 
realities which give to life all its meaning and 
value. 

There are persons, but I do not happen to 
be of their number, who believe that a law 
of compensation obtains in the world, bringing 
to every man who strives a reward, no matter 
how much he may have failed in the seeming. 
The great name of Emerson is often invoked 
to prove the existence of this law, and by many 
he is supposed to have discovered it. But did 
Emerson really penetrate to the heart of the 
matter? It seems to me that he did not. His 
a priori optimism sealed his eyes to many bit- 
ter truths of existence, and thus made him, 
large as his merits as a great spiritual force 
are, an unsafe teacher at times. The evils that 
228 



THE LONELINESS OF LIFE 

his friend Carlyle saw were dim to him. He 
could not perceive, as the great Scotsman did, 
that there is really anything wrong with the 
world. "Look at the biography of authors," 
says Carlyle; "except the Newgate Calendar, 
it is the most sickening chapter in the history 
of man." And so it is. But Emerson did not 
know that history had in its annals so much as 
one sickening chapter. His law of compensa- 
tion, when analysed, means no more than this: 
that a person after a long and wearisome 
search for gold, in which he has spent his 
health and strength fruitlessly, will find that 
he has obtained pretty shells and pebbles which 
are as good as gold, or even much better than 
the precious metal, if one will but think so. 
But the disappointed seeker is not likely to 
think so, and I must confess that my sympa- 
thies are all with the disappointed seeker. 

Something of the failure of success Emerson 
indeed did see. He saw that the successful pres- 
idential candidate was likely to leave the larger 
part of his manhood behind him. But the 
poignant distress that the noblest and best are 
almost certain to experience was not clear to 
him, as it was to Carlyle, How deeply he rev- 
erenced Plato, yet the saying, "as sad as 
229 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

Plato," which obtained currency among the 
Greeks, apparently left no impress upon him. 
The profound dejection of Carlyle himself did 
not disturb his facile optimism. But it doubt- 
less would, if he had caught the significance 
of his friend's reference to Shakespeare, when 
he wrote, in Heroes and Hero-worship: 

"Alas, Shakespeare had to write for the 
Globe Playhouse ; his great soul had to 
crush itself, as it could, into that and no 
other mould. It was with him, then, as 
it is with us all. No man works save 
under conditions. . . . Disjecta 
membra are all that we find of any poet, 
or of any man." 

Truth is as hard as rock, and as pitiless. 

The passage from Carlyle which I have 
quoted embodies the quintessence of the Lone- 
liness of life. We all have to work under 
conditions, and these conditions are seldom cal- 
culated to bring out the best that is in us, or 
that which in the depths of our hearts we de- 
sire to bring out. All truth and beauty and 
goodness are strictly personal, and yet per- 
sonality is the one thing which the public 
230 



THE LONELINESS OF LIFE 

always refuses to pardon. The person who 
thinks and feels, no matter how sincere he 
may be, is always distasteful to most of his 
contemporaries. Walt Whitman said that 
whoever touched his Leaves of Grass touched 
a man. This explains sufficiently why Whit- 
man was so unpopular with his fellow-country- 
men. The public does not want to touch a 
man when it reads a book, and yet every book, 
if it be worth the paper upon which it is writ- 
ten, is a transcript of a living soul. IT is an 
expression of a personal self, the deepest re- 
ality to be found anywhere within the uni- 
verse; and perhaps the only reality. Never- 
theless, the public, and often the editor, not 
infrequently treat a work which has been 
forged in the fire of a human heart as if it 
were nothing more than a conglomeration of 
so many idle words, fortuitously produced by 
a wild and aimless molecular dance. It would 
be better for us if the Chinese superstition 
concerning the printed word were our supersti- 
tion also, for it is a superstition that makes the 
writer seem a native, and not an alien, to the 
race which cradles him. 

We shall never witness the greatest litera- 
ture, or the finest art, or the noblest living, 
231 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

until we shall have come to appreciate the 
uniqueness of every person. Great as Shake- 
speare was, his work would doubtless have 
been much greater if the exigencies of the 
Globe Playhouse had not disturbed his genius. 
How many of his contemporaries were capable 
of appreciating the best that he had to give? 
How many, indeed, are capable of appreciat- 
ing the best that any of us have to give? The 
lack of respect for personal uniqueness, the 
prevailing notion that all ought to think and 
feel alike, is responsible for most of our medi- 
ocrity. Some relation with his kind every one 
must have, but whether the relation is to be a 
true or a false one will depend upon the con- 
ception of personality which the community 
entertains. To-day the relations between in- 
dividuals lack substance. We know nobody 
as he is, and our conventions are, for the most 
part, tainted with hypocrisy. Genius despises 
the conventions. The oak will not confine 
itself in a flower-pot; the Niagara torrent will 
not accept the dimensions of a water-tank; the 
man or woman of force will not lie, without 
protest, upon any Procrustean bed of author- 
ity. Socialism, unless it leads to a larger Indi- 
vidualism than any which the ages have been 
282 



THE LONELINESS OF LIFE 

cognizant of, will prove, if successful, the 
greatest tyranny that the world has known. 
Our socialist friends make much ado over the 
necessity for class-consciousness, as though it 
were possible for a class to have aspirations. 
But no class ever had aspirations, although it 
may have had grievances, and no class ever 
will have them. The hope of the race has 
always lain in the aspirations of the few heroic 
souls, and what has been true of the past will 
doubtless be true for a long time to come. It 
is only the personal equation which has ever 
counted, or ever will. 

It is a pitiful story, the history of this, our 
world, though Hegel, and other philosophers, 
have thought that they have discovered a ra- 
tional purpose incarnated within it, as perhaps 
they have. But to many whose vision is not so 
keen as the vision of these philosophers, the 
loneliness of existence comes as an appalling 
fact. They know that the noblest persons in 
all ages have been stoned, crucified, burned, be- 
headed, hanged, thrown into dungeons, or os- 
tracised. The record is a long one. Socrates, 
Anaxagoras, Jesus, Paul, Galileo, Bruno, Huss, 
Savonarola, Cervantes, More, Spinoza, Kant, 
Wagner, -Darwin and Whitman are the names 
233 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

of heroic men who, to a greater or lesser de- 
gree, suffered the penalty for being different 
from their contemporaries. But all persons, to 
just the extent that they differ from the multi- 
tude of the so-called average men and women, 
are made to feel the loneliness of their posi- 
tion. Blessed is the man who stands upon his 
own instincts, if he finds one staunch friend 
who truly appreciates the sincerity of his pur- 
pose. There have been many who could never 
have defined the word friendship from actual 
personal experience. 

The loneliness of life — who does not feel It, 
if he feel at all? Bacon said long ago, and 
Thoreau, in substance, repeated it after him, 
that there is little friendship in the world. 
Each of us stands upon his solitary peak of 
self, and few there be who come within close 
hailing distance of one another. Every orig- 
inal idea, every new impulse of feeling, but 
drives us deeper into our individual dungeons. 
A century or two hence the spirit may be free 
again, but the period of imprisonment is long, 
and its conditions inexorable. Our friends are, 
for the most part, of the past and future, not 
the present; the real self is often doomed to 
solitary confinement; then only our simulac- 
234 



THE LONELINESS OF LIFE 

rum wanders forth in the day, or in the night, 
clasping hands, and indulging in what we are 
pleased to term human intercourse. One may 
indeed make the best of the situation, and pre- 
serve a noble stoicism, but let no one who 
values the integrity of his mind or heart accept 
make-believe as reality. Pretty our make- 
believe may be in the seeming, but there are 
hours when pretence, even our own, fails to win 
us, and we see things as they are, in all their 
bald, colossal ugliness. Society, in the truest 
sense is, as yet, only a dream, and it will doubt- 
less be many millenniums before the dream 
comes true. 

What would we have? Edmund Spenser, a 
poet's poet, has tried to answer the question 
for us, in his Muiopotmus, when he says: 

"What more felicity can fall to creature 
Than to enjoy delight with liberty, — 
And to be lord of all the works of nature.^ 
To reign in the air from the earth to highest sky, 
To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature, 
To take whatever thing doth please the eye.'' 
Who rests not pleased with such happiness. 
Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness." 

But is this enough? No, it is not. We may 

be sure that it would never have been enough 

235 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

for the poet himself. Man is more than na- 
ture, and one human heart, which truly re- 
sponds to our own, is worth more than all the 
fairness of earth and sea and sky. All the 
beauty and sublimity and wonder of nature will 
not assuage the pain thatthe isolated soul feels, 
even when nature is seen at her sweetest and 
best. The charm that the great world-out-of- 
doors has for us is only a charm that the poet 
has instilled within our minds. The singing 
robes of nature are all woven of human tex- 
ture. The wilderness is paradise enough when 
shared with a friend; it is an inferno when one 
dwells therein as a solitary monarch. There is 
no hope or joy for the individual save in Hu- 
manity. If no human heart beats against our 
own, then is the loneliness of life present with 
us as a bitter and appalhng thing. To make 
for a better understanding of men, to value 
the uniqueness of every person — this is pure 
and undefiled religion. Conflict there must 
necessarily be, but we shall never be truly civ- 
ilised until we shall have learned to respect, 
and even to admire, our honest foes. It is not 
conflict between man and man, but the Loneli- 
ness of Life, that eats, like an acid, into our 
hearts. 

236 



CONSERVATISM AND REFORM 

T7VERY man Is both a Conservative and a 
Radical. There Is no one who wishes to 
destroy everything that is ; there is no one who 
desires to retain all things that are. The Con- 
servative Is simply a person who is, upon the 
whole, satisfied with present conditions; the 
Radical Is simply a person who is very largely 
dissatisfied with them, and desirous of change. 
There are persons who reveal a large mixture 
of Radical and Conservative elements; Con- 
servative in politics, it may be, and Radical in 
their religious views, or vice versa; there are 
others who are generally Radical, or generally 
Conservative, but who hold fast to some Rad- 
ical idea, or to some Conservative one. 

The average individual is not a logician; he 
is not logical In his usual ways of thinking. A 
majority of men could give no very lucid rea- 
son why they hold this article or that of the 
creeds which they profess. They have ac- 
quired their ideas from their parents, or their 
237 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

teachers, or the prevailing sentiment of their 
respective communities. The Marxians insist 
that one is governed by his material self-inter- 
ests, but experience reveals that this is less true 
than might be supposed. There are times 
when self-interest is almost a negligible quan- 
tity. A person intoxicated with an idea will 
cast every shred of self-interest to the winds, 
and surrender himself, a willing martyr, to a 
cause which he is barely able to understand, or 
is even quite unable to comprehend. Persons 
are loyal to a church whose theological tenets 
have never penetrated their understandings, to 
kings whom they have never seen, and of 
whom they know nothing, to political leaders 
who are. to them but little more than gilded 
names. There is much that is sublime, much 
that is humiliating, in this loyalty of men. But 
it reveals that feeling, rather than thought, 
turns the wheels of human life, although the 
feeling had its source in a thought of some 
human soul. 

The human race has never progressed spon- 
taneously, and as a unit; only the individual 
succeeds in raising himself above himself. The 
masses are like the ocean, which is at rest until 
the wind plays over its surface, or the moon 



CONSERVATISM AND REFORM 

exerts her gravitating power. In spite of all 
that is credited to evolution, there is not, so far 
as one can see, any progress on the part of the 
race, save as the race comes under the influ- 
ence of a master-mind, a genius, a hero, who 
lifts it to his own level by dint of some mys- 
tery, which will never find an explanation out- 
side of metaphysics. The Johannine Christ 
says: "If I be lifted up, I will draw all men 
unto me"; and all progress recorded by history 
has consisted in following a leader, who was 
lifted up by the power of an idea, that ger- 
minated, apparently spontaneously, in his mind. 
No doubt the seeds of progress lie within the 
hearts and minds of all individuals, but they 
will not germinate spontaneously in the ma- 
jority; some human light and warmth must 
penetrate to them before that miracle will be 
witnessed. Democracy itself is a plant whose 
seeds matured first in aristocratic hearts. 

Now the majority of human beings, be it re- 
membered, are always fairly well satisfied with 
things as they are. Men may try to improve 
their personal condition a little here, or a little 
there, but most of them bear no ill-will toward 
the society into which they were born, no mat- 
ter how despitefully this society may have used 
239 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

them. The African torn from his sunny home, 
and brought to America to serve in bondage, 
may have nourished for a time some sHght 
spirit of rebellion, but his sons and daughters 
did not. On the contrary, these young blacks 
were very well contented with the conditions 
of servile toil which inured to the economic 
benefit of their masters and mistresses, and it 
is certain that the owners were no more firmly 
convinced that slavery was a divine institution 
than were the slaves themselves. The horror 
of slavery was born in the souls of men like 
Garrison and Phillips, not in the souls of those 
to whom slavery was the daily reality of reali- 
ties. A few superior negroes, like Frederick 
Douglass, did feel the horror of it, but the im- 
pulse to freedom on their part was usually born 
out of abnormal conditions. The Frederick 
Douglasses of slavery were certainly few in 
number, comparatively speaking; for when 
freedom was already in sight, a majority of the 
slaves still clung with pathetic loyalty to their 
masters and mistresses. 

Socialists, and many who are not Socialists, 
see in the average man of our time what they 
call a "wage-slave," and, in truth, a "wage- 
slave" is all that the average man can right- 
240 



CONSERVATISM AND REFORM 

fully be called. For the average man does not 
own himself; he is owned by another, or by a 
corporation. Nevertheless, the wage-slave is 
no more conscious of the degradation of his 
condition than the African slave was. He is 
chained and fettered, but he does not feel the 
chains and fetters galling to his limbs. His 
master does not need, as a rule, to put a pad- 
lock upon his lips; he is as dumb as a sheep 
before the shearer. The average man takes it 
for granted that he was born into the world to 
be a hireling; to hew wood and draw water, to 
labor in shop, in factory and field, which 
others own, and to receive a scanty pittance in 
return for his toil from those who grow rich 
out of the profits. And as the horror of 
African slavery was born, not in the souls of 
the slaves themselves, but in the souls of free 
men and women, so the horror of wage-slavery 
was born, not in the souls of the wage-slaves, 
but in the souls of men who were born outside 
of the class of wage-slaves, or, at least, suc- 
ceeded in rising out of it. The intellectuals 
are the great anti-wage-slave propagandists of 
to-day. Most of our ablest litterateurs are 
either Socialists, or Anarchists, outright, or 
they sympathize with those who are. These 
Ml 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

men, one might suppose, should be reasonably 
well satisfied with things as they are, but they 
are not satisfied. And, if Capitalism ever re- 
ceives its death-blow, the impetus will come 
from persons who have as good reason to be 
satisfied with present conditions as the bitterest 
enemies of Socialism have. What made Wil- 
liam Morris a Socialist? or John Ruskin? or 
Robert Owen? or Oscar Wilde? or William 
Dean Howells? What made Elisee Reclus, 
the world's greatest geographer, an Anarchist? 
or Prince Kropotkin? or Henrik Ibsen? or 
Count Tolstoy? These men were successful 
enough. What produced in them their feeling 
of discontent, and sympathy for the workers? 
To ask these questions is easy; to answer 
them is more difficult; nay, in the last analysis, 
impossible, if we seek an answer that shall 
satisfy the Rationalist. Any one could under- 
stand a rebellion of the slaves and the down- 
trodden; any one could understand the attitude 
of mind which might lead to a revolt of the 
weary and the heavy-laden. But the smug-faced 
prosperous Conservative is unable to under- 
stand, and he will never be able to understand, 
why persons who are prosperous, or fairly 
prosperous, should interfere with social con- 
242 



CONSERVATISM AND REFORM 

ditions, and go forth proclaiming revolution- 
ary messages. Well, there is no rational an- 
swer to be given why prosperous folk should 
do so, if, by rational, we mean what all can 
understand. What men call Reason explains 
very little that is beautiful, or sublimely true. 
Nobody knows why a genius will almost starve 
himself, and submit to all manner of direful 
deprivation, in order that he may write his 
poem, or compose his music, or paint his pic- 
ture, or write his philosophical treatise. Plato 
believed that the poet was one who had been 
seized by a divine madness, and perhaps this 
notion of Plato's is as rational as any which 
can be conceived of in our present state of in- 
tellectual and spiritual development. For the 
truth is that we do not know what makes any 
man a poet, a revolutionary, or a lover. The 
love of man for man, for his country, or for 
the world, is the greatest of all mysteries. 
People debate whether Jesus worked miracles, 
and fail to see that he was himself, in his tow- 
ering love for mankind, a miracle of miracles. 
The genuine reformer is always a lover, and 
a great lover is necessarily a genius. I am 
forced to admit, however, that there are many 
so-called reformers who are not to be placed 
S4S 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

in the category of lovers, or of geniuses. They 
form the class of pseudo-reformers, which 
caused Lowell to write: "Every reformer is 
at heart a blackguard," and Thoreau to say: 
"I love reform, but I hate reformers." It has 
been said of Wendell Phillips that he had a 
vicious streak. Ho'wever true or false this 
statement may have been, most of us have 
come into contact with the pseudo-reformer 
who uses the cause of reform in order to ex- 
ploit himself. There are, indeed, some very 
little folk who pose as reformers. They have 
the heart of a stone and the soul of an insect. 
They are not big enough to dwell in love, 
neither are they big enough to dwell in hate; 
to attract attention to their own little two by 
four souls is the whole of their ambition. 
They attack the landlord, or the capitalist, for 
exploiting the people, not because they really 
love the people, or really hate the people's ene- 
mies, but in order to shine in the limelight. 
Some live on a vegetarian diet, not because 
they like vegetables, or regard meat as danger- 
ous to their health, nor even through any sym- 
pathy for the slaughtered animals, but for the 
simple reason that, if they did not Indulge in 
some eccentric act, nobody would pay any at- 
244! 



CONSERVATISM AND REFORM 

tention to them. They denounce the church, 
because it costs less to denounce it than to con- 
tribute to its support. Indeed, this type of re- 
former has little interest in any kind of reform 
if it costs him anything. He, too, like the cap- 
itaHst, or the landlord, whom he belabors, is 
the slave of his purse. Does his brother, for 
whom he professes so much sympathy, starve, 
or walk, a homeless stranger, the city's streets? 
Well, this, in his opinion, is a crime of society 
to be railed against, but he never considers the 
question of his own personal duty in the mat- 
ter. He loves reform; he believes in Social- 
ism, or the Single Tax, or some other panacea 
for the social aches and ills to which We have 
fallen heir, but even an unfortunate Socialist, 
or Single Taxer, would fare ill if he went to 
him for relief. Sometimes this pseudo-re- 
former justifies himself on the ground — so sat- 
isfactory to his purse, and selfishness of heart 
— that the pain of the tortured is the seed of 
reform; or, it may be, he is full of Darwin and 
the dogma of the survival of the fittest, quite 
oblivious of his inconsistency. It has been said 
that none are so uncharitable as the Socialists. 
I know not whether this be true or not, but it 
is a common trait of all pseudo-reformers to 
246 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

reveal their uncharltableness, after they have 
thrown their small wits in the public's face, 
and proclaimed from the house-tops their un- 
dying devotion to mankind. They should be 
known for what they are, and placed in the 
pillory of human contempt. 

The genuine reformer, however, as I have 
said, is always a lover. He does not lose sight 
of the individual in the forest of humanity. 
He loves the real man, and not the rhetorical 
image merely. He loves the individual, be- 
cause he sees the potentialities that inhere in 
every individual. To be a true reformer, one 
must possess sight and insight. And the real 
secret of all the great reformers of the world 
I believe to have been their innate perception 
of some genuine worth, some real value, in the 
individual, which was buried by the monstrosi- 
ties of society that they waged war against. 
The apostles of Democracy have seen that soci- 
ety does not secure the highest good so long as 
some individuals are forbidden to claim pos- 
session of their own souls. The Socialist sees 
that the division between classes and masses 
keeps the multitude from a realization of the 
self. The Anarchist perceives that coercion 
is the destruction of the mind. In the large 
M6 



CONSERVATISM AND REFORM 

essentials, Democrats, Socialists, and Anarch- 
ists have been apostles of light, although their 
vision has seldom been pure, for it is not 
given to many to see life steadily and see it 
whole. 

All true reform means liberation; it means 
a new freedom somewhere. When we shall 
have secured the free mind and the free body, 
the task of the reformer will be over. The 
Conservative and the Radical will then be at 
one. Have we any reason to believe that so 
happy a consummation will ever be reached? 
No, that is unquestionably too much to expect, 
for the Ideal which lures humanity ever up- 
ward and onward is not finite, but infinite. 
Philosophers have discussed the goal of Evolu- 
tion, but there is no goal of Evolution. There 
is no "One far-off, divine event, to which the 
whole creation moves." There are goals in- 
numerable, goal beyond goal, and there shall 
be from everlasting to everlasting. A reform 
accomplished only reveals the necessity of a 
new reform. The clearest-sighted of Radicals 
never get to the bottom of the roots. And the 
Conservative is needed no less than the Rad- 
ical, for he sees what the Radical often over- 
looks, namely, the noble things that have 
247 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

already been secured, and may not be dis- 
carded without peril. 

I am frank to confess my radicalism. But 
I am a Conservative, too. And I perceive 
with regret that most of the radicalisms of the 
hour are spotted with much that is hideous and 
forbidding. Our Radicals, if left to them- 
selves to work out our destinies, would prove 
no less dangerous to the interests of the race 
than the Conservatives, if left to themselves. 
The war for the liberation of the human mind 
and body needs to be waged, and waged vigor- 
ously, and I am a Radical because I believe in 
the absolute freedom of the human soul from 
coercive restraint; but when I perceive that 
many of our Radicals forget to pay tribute to 
the value of art, of letters, of metaphysics and 
religion, or, at least, adequate tribute to them, 
it becomes evident to me that conservatism has 
much to say for itself. How much that is 
finest in human life the great Tolstoy himself 
would have destroyed! How barren his, and 
all other, asceticism is! "Who but the Poet 
was it," says Goethe, in Wilhelm Meister, 
"that first formed gods for us; that exalted us 
to them, and brought them down to us?" But 
many a Radical has learned to speak disre- 
S48 



CONSERVATISM AND REFORM 

spectfuUy both of the poets and the gods. 
Utilitarianism is placed above beauty, and 
wealth is exalted above the ideals of religion. 
Our Socialists are usually materialists, and 
polite Radicals are prone to a cheerless ag- 
nosticism. But radicalism when it dispenses 
with the ideals of religion, and eschews the 
spirit of the great poets and prophets of the 
world, will discover ultimately that it has for- 
saken the stars, to admire a will-o'-the-wisp, 
wandering over treacherous bogs. Without 
the consolations and inspirations of religion, 
there can be no line of prophets, and, without 
prophets, there can be no enduring life. Let 
us banish the nightmares of religion, but let 
us conserve its divlnest dreams. One cannot 
rally men forever to fight around the banner of 
a grievance. There is little magic in a cause 
that has no higher object in view than to en- 
able persons to gratify without stint their 
stomach-hungers and sexual desires. Our ma- 
terialist friends may think otherwise, and com- 
mon weakness may seem to justify them; but 
there is a mystical element in man's nature^ 
which causes the masses to turn away very 
quickly from the philosopher who can promise 
them nothing but brute satisfactions. Man is 
£4*9 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

not a brute, but a spirit, and Socialism, or 
Anarchism, or any other radicalism must ac- 
quire this truth before it can conquer the 
world. Many Socialists, indeed, endeavor to 
make of Socialism a religion, and this is well, 
if they do not forsake the truly inspiring dog- 
mas that have come down from the past. They 
must incorporate all the vital elements of 
Christianity. The heart and head of humanity 
must be satisjGed. One must feel the greatness 
of himself, and of his kind, before he will will- 
ingly become a martyr, and no cause has ever 
succeeded which did not possess a large num- 
ber of followers who were willing to be sacri- 
ficed for the higher good. Will men willingly 
lay down their lives in order to give all men 
an opportunity to appease their stomach and 
sexual hungers, if there be no nobler battle- 
cry floating in the wind? Take away the in- 
spiration which comes from the religious sen- 
timent, and all radicalism will be but a sowing 
of the wind and the reaping of the whirlwind. 
There will always be need of reform; hence 
there will always be need of Radicals. But 
our reformers must learn to be true Conserva- 
tives, no less than Radicals, for all true reform 
will be rooted and grounded in inspirations 
^50 



CONSERVATISM AND REFORM 

which have whispered to us out of the past. 
Cortes did wisely, no doubt, when he burned 
his ships upon reaching the coast of Mexico, 
but no thinker or artist will ever consent to 
burn his library or art-treasures, no matter 
what shore of destiny he may reach. He will 
heed the truth which Walter Pater proclaimed, 
in a striking passage of Gaston de Latour, a 
truth too often overlooked by reformers. "It 
happens most naturally, of course," said Pater, 
in speaking of Bruno, "that those who undergo 
the shock of spiritual or intellectual change 
sometimes fail to recognize their debt to the 
deserted cause: — How much of the heroism, 
or other high quality, of their rejection has 
really been the product of what they reject? 
Bruno, the escaped monk, is still a monk; and 
his philosophy, impious as it might seem to 
some, a religion." The true reformer will re- 
joice with Whittier that — -. 

"All the good the past hath had 
Remains to make our own time glad.** 

The radical reformer may say, as George 

Fox, speaking two hundred and fifty years ago, 

did: "The Bible is not the Word of God; 

only the Divine Spirit speaking in every man 

251 



THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

is that Word" ; yet he will be glad to acknowl- 
edge, if he does not overlook the truth which 
the wise Conservative would instil within him, 
that the word of God is found in the Bible, 
and in every other sincere book that has come 
from the mind of a man. All of the radical 
creeds of the hour are packed with truths. 
The Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists 
are speaking words of wisdom to which we 
can refuse to listen only to our hurt. But if 
these Radicals would win us, they must inspire 
us, and inspiration, I verily beheve, will be 
found only in sentiments professed by Con- 
servatives, but too seldom adhered to by them 
in the more strenuous hours of their daily lives. 
It is an old maxim, as old indeed as Democ- 
ritus, that, "from nothing, nothing comes"; 
and the inspirations of man were never manu- 
factured in a vacuum. 

Let men despise the idealism of the past as 
much as they please, the best that is in them, 
and in all of us, has its root in that ennobling 
culture of the spirit which began so many ages 
ago. The person who believes firmly that man 
is spirit, and that man is here to grow, to de- 
velop, to unfold, in truth, beauty and goodness, 
can never be a Conservative of the baser sort. 
252 



CONSERVATISM AND REFORM 

His opposition to what professes to be reform, 
if opposed to it he be, will be based upon the 
belief that the change desired would work 
harm, rather than good; for he has only the 
highest welfare of his race at heart. Thus 
his opposition will never be based upon his ma- 
terial self-interests, so-called; for these inter- 
ests he has learned to despise, whenever they 
are found to conflict with the higher interests 
of the species ; his prejudices he has cast aside, 
for he has come to see that the interests of the 
individual and the interests of the race are, in 
reality, identical. But if we may accept Lib- 
erty, Equality, and Fraternity as ideals im- 
posed upon us by our larger selves, for 
humanity to realize in the now and here, 
the present should be for us a period of golden 
dreams. If life means nothing, if the universe 
means nothing, then reform is only an illusory 
word, which has come to confuse us upon the 
highway of Despair; but if in our highest 
ideals we may find the real meaning of our per- 
sonal lives, because they are the quintessence of 
the spiritual universe, whose avatars we should 
be, then there is nothing too glorious for the 
heart of man to conceive. 



253 



